Nov. 7--A Middleton company that won the Governor's Business Plan Contest earlier this year has raised $1 million from angel investors.

Eso-Technologies Inc. will use the money to develop a heart monitoring device that would replace the one being used now by surgeons, said Bonnie Reinke, the company's president and chief executive officer.

DaneVest Tech Fund led the funding round, which also had participation from individual members of Phenomenelle Angels and other investors.

Eso-Technologies' device is the brainchild of John L. Atlee, a retired Hartland cardiovascular anesthesiologist who has been developing the technology for the past 10 years. It involves additional heart monitoring sensors placed on a minimally invasive esophageal stethoscope.

The current device used for heart monitoring during surgery -- a pulmonary artery catheter that is threaded up a large vein in the patient's legs or through their necks -- causes up to 45,000 deaths annually, said Joseph Hildebrandt, DaneVest's managing director.

Bringing Atlee's device to market won't take years of clinical trials and millions of dollars, Hildebrandt said.

The company expects to be able to put the device in trials in early 2010. The entire project will likely take about three years and $3 million, he said.

Eso-Technologies was seeking $830,000, and could have raised even more than the $1 million it pulled in, Hildebrandt said.

Hildebrandt said he first became aware of the company when Reinke presented its story at the Elevator Pitch Olympics at the Wisconsin Early Stage Symposium a year ago. Reinke, who was previously a general manager at GE Healthcare, went on from there to win the Governor's Business Plan Contest in June.

"They emerged from 326 entries in the most competitive Governor's Business Plan Contest to date, and it was clear their technology could be put to use pretty quickly in operating room situations," said Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council.

"Eso-Technologies generated interest really quickly. You could feel it happening at the entrepreneurs' conference in June when they won, and that interest has sustained itself to the point that they've now closed on a first round," Still said.

Several venture capital firms contacted Reinke after she presented at a recent life sciences venture conference in Madison to express "serious interest" in helping to fund Eso-Technologies after it completes the trials on its device, Hildebrandt said.

Eso-Technologies has six patents on its technology, and Reinke said she knows of just one other company that's doing something similar. But that company can't do electrocardiogram, or ECG, monitoring in the esophagus, she said.

The company plans to develop further uses for its device as a diagnostic and therapeutic tool, Reinke said.

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