Octin Health, a five-person Minneapolis medical device company, won the grand prize at the 2026 Minnesota Cup this week, taking $75,000 in non-dilutive funding for Elika, a device designed to keep blood flowing to the brain and body during aortic arch surgery. The company says the money will go toward product development and the regulatory work ahead of an FDA submission it expects to file early next year.

Octin Health reached the final as the winner of the Life Science and Health IT division, one of nine divisions in the competition, which is run by the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. The grand prize is awarded on top of a division win.

Elika is a specialized cardiopulmonary bypass tube, inserted into a vein, that the company says maintains circulation to the brain and body while surgeons operate on the aortic arch. Octin says the device is intended to reduce surgeons' reliance on deep hypothermic circulatory arrest, and claims it can remove the need for the technique altogether.

In circulatory arrest, the patient is cooled so that the organs need less oxygen, and blood flow is then stopped so the surgical team can work on the aorta without blood obscuring the field. The cooling is what protects the brain and the visceral organs through the period without circulation, and the surgical literature on arch surgery describes cerebral protection and perfusion management as the problems the method has been refined around since it entered practice in the 1960s.

The company started in late 2023, when Meghana Helder, a cardiovascular surgeon who trained at the Mayo Clinic and is now Octin's chief executive, began working through the idea with fellow surgeons. Octin launched the following year. "What the device allows us to do is maintain blood flow to the body, including the brain, while stopping blood flow from the aorta as we replace the damaged portion," Helder told trade publication MD+DI.

The competition gave the team more than just a check. Laura Walter, Octin's chief operating officer, told Twin Cities Business that the mentoring pushed the company on how it presents itself: "It wasn't about being 'Minnesota nice,' but rather, trying to elevate us and tell our story better."

Life sciences and medical device companies in Minnesota are a consistent feature of that state’s investment numbers. 

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