The Winning Healthcare SaaS Founder Journey: Funded by Millions in Grants

Steve Waddell is the Founder, President, and CEO of Index HealthTech, an NIH-funded health technology company, and the author of the award-winning book Valuepreneurs. Before founding the company, he spent 25 years at Newport News Shipbuilding, where he developed the risk management process for the U.S. Navy's aircraft carrier construction program. He later joined his wife's government consulting business, Reed Integration Inc., helping grow it into a multi-million-dollar government consulting company. In 2018, Waddell founded Nasoni, a hardware startup that reinvented the bathroom faucet, before pivoting the company into Index HealthTech, which developed the Healthy Habits Index to measure functional and neurodegenerative decline through changes in daily activities. That mission is rooted in his own experience with his father-in-law's fall and his father's decline, and in his TEDx talk, "Start with Who, Not Why," which explores identifying who has the pain before deciding what to build. ### In this episode... In this episode of Lessons from the Leap, host Ghazenfer Mansoor, CEO of Technology Rivers, known for AI, SaaS, and HIPAA-compliant HealthTech development, and author of Beyond the Download, sits down with Steve Waddell, Founder, President, and CEO of Index HealthTech, to explore a healthcare SaaS founder journey from a bathroom faucet startup to a grant-funded health tech company. Waddell shares the personal origin story behind the pivot: watching his father-in-law fall in the shower and his father decline rapidly in assisted living, which revealed a gap in catching functional decline before it becomes a crisis.  The conversation dives into the mechanics of funding health technology without giving up equity. Waddell discusses how a string of grants, a $314,000 Phase I award, a $75,000 Commonwealth Commercialization award, a $2.02 million NICHD grant, and a $2.58 million National Institute of Aging grant supported the transformation of the company into a health tech company, showing how non-dilutive funding can help advance a health tech startup from early product development toward commercialization. We also explore the Sense Radar, Sense Charger, and Sense Lamp devices, and how they score decline on the Healthy Habits Index. Join Ghazenfer Mansoor in today's episode of Lessons from the Leap as he speaks with Steve Waddell. Together, they explore the "painkiller versus vitamin" philosophy behind his TEDx talk, "Start with Who, Not Why," the shift from reactive to proactive health monitoring, and why building health technology for aging in place requires balancing grant-funded innovation with the discipline to keep pivoting.