Since its founding in 1998, Vecna Technologies has developed a number of ways to help hospitals care for patients. The company has produced intake systems to respond to Covid-19 patient surges, prediction systems to manage health complications in maternity wards, and telepresence robots that have allowed sick people to stay connected with friends and loved ones.
The differences among those products have also led to a number of transformations and spinoffs, including material handling company Vecna Robotics and the health care nonprofit VecnaCares. Vecna Technologies co-founders Deborah Noel Theobald ’95 and Daniel Theobald ’95, SM ’98 say each of those pivots has been driven by a desire to build a robotics company that makes a positive impact on the world.
“We knew we wanted to do robotics and do something good in the world,” Deborah says of the team’s mindset. “We founded Vecna thinking, ‘How can these new web technologies influence and improve health care?’ That’s the arc MIT set me on and something I’ve been excited to pursue ever since.”
“A fun ride”
As a child, Deborah Theobald wanted to be an astronaut. The desire led her to MIT, which had one of the few aerospace engineering programs for undergraduates. She got interested in the health care industry while studying the health effects of long-term space exploration with Professor Dava Newman, the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics at MIT who is now also the director of the Media Lab.
Deborah also met Daniel Theobald at MIT. Daniel had been building robots since he was a child and was majoring in mechanical engineering.
The two began thinking about starting a company, and Daniel even applied to the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition (then the $10K) with a rough idea for a robotics company.
For their master’s degrees, Deborah went to the University of Maryland to continue studying health effects in space, while Daniel stayed at MIT, working on several robotics projects. When Daniel graduated in 1998, Vecna was born.
From day one, the company had a policy of paying employees to spend 10 percent of their work week doing community service.
“We found that our focus on giving back benefited the business in so many ways that it was absolutely, unambiguously the right thing to do,” Daniel says. “For one, it was a self-filtering mechanism. People joined Vecna who believed in giving back and wanted to be part of something that was socially responsible. And we found those are also the people that make amazing employees.”
The founders got their first big break with a government contract to build a health care portal that allowed patients, managers, and providers to communicate and share documents. The contract also provided flexibility for the founders to explore other avenues for the business.
The pair went on to earn a number of government grants for one-off projects, some of which blossomed into successful commercial products. Another grant tasked them with building models to help hospitals predict and manage hospital acquired infections (HAIs), which kill tens of thousands of people in the U.S. each year. The resulting tool ended up being deployed in about 100 hospitals.
“At the time, people were using spreadsheets to pull in data from different systems … and trying to comprehend what kind of infection it was,” Deborah says, noting that doctors usually start infected patients on general antibiotics before they can classify the disease. “Our tool allowed them to pull that information together faster, reducing their stay …….