Tela Bio at Canaccord Conference: Strategic Growth in Soft Tissue Repair

On Wednesday, 13 August 2025, Tela Bio (NASDAQ:TELA) presented its strategic vision at Canaccord Genuity’s 45th Annual Growth Conference. The company emphasized its innovative approach in the soft tissue restoration market, highlighting both its achievements and challenges. While Tela Bio reported significant revenue growth and strategic leadership changes, it also addressed past setbacks in sales force management.

Key Takeaways

• Tela Bio projects revenue of $85-88 million this year, up from $69 million last year.
• The company is focusing on non-permanent solutions for hernia repair, moving away from traditional polypropylene mesh.
• Strategic initiatives include expanding into European markets and securing GPO and IDN contracts.
• A new commercial leadership team from Abiomed is set to drive business scaling.
• Tela Bio aims to achieve profitability with flat operational expenses and sufficient cash reserves.

Financial Results

• Revenue is projected between $85 million and $88 million, showing strong growth from last year’s $69 million.
• Operational expenses are expected to remain flat, with the company confident in its cash reserves to reach profitability.
• The first half of the year performed slightly ahead of internal expectations.

Operational Updates

• A new leadership team from Abiomed has been appointed to scale the business effectively.
• Tela Bio has secured GPO and IDN contracts to enhance market access.
• The company is developing a new product category, Reinforced Tissue Matrix (RTM), with about 25 contracts in place.
• Expansion into European markets is underway, with plans to file a design dossier for PRS products by year-end.
• The territory manager and account specialist model is proving successful, with some territories achieving $4 million in revenue.

Future Outlook

• Tela Bio anticipates a shift towards robotic hernia repairs, expecting 80% of procedures to adopt this method.
• The company aims to reach $500 million in revenue with its current product portfolio.
• Expansion plans include increasing the presence of IHR products in the UK and Europe.
• RTM contracts are expected to extend across all GPOs, including Vizient, by the end of the year.

Q&A Highlights

• The company addressed a Q4 setback involving the loss of sales representatives, implementing strategic changes to recover.
• Greg Firestone will focus on RTM contracting and market access in Europe, while Jeff Blizzard will optimize the sales force structure.
• Tela Bio is concentrating on expanding its user base in teaching institutions and engaging young attendings.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a detailed account of Tela Bio’s strategic initiatives and financial performance.

Full transcript - Canaccord Genuity’s 45th Annual Growth Conference:

Caitlin Cronin, Medical Device Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Good morning and thank you for joining us at this year’s Canaccord Genuity Growth Conference. My name is Caitlin Cronin and I’m one of the medical device analysts here at Canaccord Genuity. With us today is TeleBio, a public company focused on novel soft tissue solutions for hernia repair and reconstructive plastic surgery. With me today is Tony Koblish, President and CEO, as well as Roberto Cucas, CFO, COO. And before we begin, I want to remind everyone of any relevant disclosures which can be found on our conference and our firm website.

We’ll begin with a brief presentation by the Tele team followed by a fireside chat. And with that, I’ll hand it over to Tony.

Tony Koblish, President and CEO, TeleBio: Thank you, Caitlin, and thank you to Caitlin and the research team and Canaccord for inviting us to this conference and thank you for attending. So first we’ll acknowledge the forward looking statements. So as Caitlin said, we’re a commercial stage soft tissue restoration and preservation company. We work in two key areas, all things hernia repair. The hernia repair market is undergoing radical transformation and we are both driving it and going to be a beneficiary of it in the future.

The first transformation in hernia repair is the movement away from legacy based polypropylene mesh, which has had a checkered history of litigation, patient problems and settlement both in the OBGYN area first and then followed up with a roughly $2,000,000,000 settlement on the hernia side most recently. So that’s driven and we have been a very big catalyst in pushing both the industry and caregivers to give what patients want which is a non permanent plastic solution to repair their hernia and their belly. TeleBio has been one of the progenitors and drivers of pushing this agenda and we have definitely been a disruptor and the whole industry is starting to move in this direction after we’ve been pushing it for several years. The other area is the advent of the robot. So robotic hernia repair is probably about thirty percent of all procedures.

It may be closer to seventy percent of the simple hernia procedures such as inguinal and hiatal procedures and we have developed our natural repair solution to be highly robot compatible. So when you look at those two trends, at the end of the day we’re probably going to have about eighty percent of all hernias being repaired robotically. We’re going to see a radical shift away from permanent synthetic materials. We are perfectly situated to be both a disruptor and a beneficiary of those trends based on how we’ve set the company up. The second area that we work in is plastic and reconstructive surgery, particularly breast reconstruction.

This area of the market is also undergoing a transformation for the last thirty or forty years. Cadaver skin has been the main reinforcement agent and now we’re starting to see that product become commoditized. It’s a bit too expensive. It stretches a bit too much. It integrates slowly.

So there’s a big interest in new and novel technologies and materials. Again, we will be the beneficiary of that with a wide portfolio. Both of our product categories are filled with multiple products that can do almost any procedure with any surgeon preference type. So we’re very well situated in two big markets. Those markets total to well over $2,000,000,000 We are on track to be an 85,000,000 to $88,000,000 company this year up from about a $69,000,000 company last year.

We’ve had a good strong start to the first half of the year. We’re slightly ahead of our internal plan and we look forward to driving this company forward. We brought in a very strong new commercial leadership team most recently from Abiomed. They came to us after the acquisition by J and J. The crew that we bought in were responsible for the surgical division within Abiomed, which went from zero to about $500,000,000 So we are on our way to being a $100,000,000 business with very novel and disruptive products.

And now we have a commercial team in place that has experience in scaling from that $100,000,000 to $500,000,000 So all of the processes and systems, upgrading and talent acquisition, all of that I think is well in hand. That team has been on board for about ten months and we look forward to their contributions in the second half of the year. So just a couple of details here before I turn it over to Caitlin. So I talked about the leadership team. Our pathway is all DRG reimbursement so there’s really no problems in getting paid for these procedures.

Very common procedures both hernia repair and post mastectomy breast reconstruction. And our product offers an exceptional value proposition both clinically and economically. So we’ve been very successful as a small entrant into this space and attaining all the major GPO contracts which is leading to IDN contracting which gives us access to the hospital. I talked about our robot compatibility which is absolutely critical and you know I think I covered most of that. But soft tissue restoration and preservation, so we want to be able to get the patients healthy, up and moving without destroying their tissue and if the product ever has to be removed, we want it to be done in a minimally damaging way.

So this just gives you a sense for our scale. We are well over 73,000 implantations at this point. We’ve got well over 40 publications. Our published clinical data in both areas is exceptional. By any measure, the recurrence rate, so the reoperate in hernia is in the low single digits, orders of magnitude in some case better than our competitors.

We’ve got a large number of hospitals covered through GPO contracting and our PRS business is also growing. This product launched about three years after hernia, so it’s a little earlier in its launch curve, but we’re well over 16,000 implantations. What I’m really, really happy to share is that for the first time now we have about 400 patients in various clinical studies that have been published and presented for our PRS business. So on the hernia side, we’re overflowing with solid clinical data which has helped drive our business exceptionally well. On the PRS side, we now have the baseline of that clinical data to help drive that business going forward as well.

So I think I’ll stop there for Q and A. I mean there’s I think we can cover most of the detail in the rest of the presentations through the questions. Caitlin, if that’s okay? All right.

Caitlin Cronin, Medical Device Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Great. So, you know, maybe just starting with the Q2, you know, thoughts on where we are as you guys exit the first half of the year and, you know, what do you want investors to understand coming out of the Q2 results?

Tony Koblish, President and CEO, TeleBio: Yeah. So, you know, so we had a hiccup in Q4 of last year, right? I think we had a little bit of a perfect storm where there were several large companies putting plastic surgery sales forces together for the first time. And then SANUWAVE, the last presentation, the wound care saga, there’s a lot of shenanigans going on with skin substitutes and amniotic tissue in particular with reimbursement that is probably excessive and it’s attracting a lot of bad practices and behavior. So a lot of reps were attracted to that opportunity with large sign on bonuses and a lot of solid guarantees.

I think the fact that CMS is starting to take a good hard look on that, that’s put a good chill on that, but we did lose a solid number of reps in Q4, but we bounced back really well by the first quarter. We had the morale, we made adjustments, right, reps don’t just leave for no reason. We made some leadership changes and we just did what we had to do and we came out very strong in the first quarter with very good growth relative to Q4 and then twenty six percent growth in Q2 albeit a smidge behind consensus. If you look at the first half block for our company, we were a little bit ahead of our internal plan driven by a strong first quarter. So we’ve got Jeff Blizzard and Jim Hagen, two guys that we brought over from Abiomed.

They’ve been in situ now for about ten weeks. In their first three weeks, they met every single employee in the company, including every single sales rep. They went to every single one of our regional training sessions. So they’ve had the ability to assess the talent that we have, assess the morale, assess the product and the value proposition, and now they’re in the process of figuring out what their moves are and their recommendations which probably leads to your next question.

Caitlin Cronin, Medical Device Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Yeah, no, that’s great. Perfect. Yeah, you noted the appointment of Jeff Blizzard, you know, why now and what are some of the early initiatives that Jeff has implemented?

Tony Koblish, President and CEO, TeleBio: Yeah, so, you know, we initially installed Greg Firestone who was originally our Chief Business Officer who was probably one of the top, you know, supply chain IDN, GPO relationship builders in the country. He actually had a company that he ran the IDN Summit which he sold and that IDN Summit is still going on, so he knows everybody. So, he’s been exceptionally strong in getting us GPO and IDN contracting and he developed a plan last year to create our own category so that we could get outside of the large corporate bundling across our service line. So we call that the RTM, the Reinforced Tissue Matrix exit plan and Reinforced Tissue Matrix is our product, right? We’re the only company in the world that can have this product.

It’s patent protected for decades. I think we have 22 patents and the patents are still issuing, so there’s a very long runway on those patents. So what we’ve done is we’ve taken advantage of the fact that we have something that no other company has we’ve been able to work with supply chain to convince them that we should have our own category, which means we would fall outside of any corporate bundling structures. So we started this process at the end of last year and usually it’s a bureaucratic slow process when you’re dealing with GPOs and hospital systems. But I’m happy to say that Greg’s been quite successful and we have about 25 of these RTM contracts in place.

So that’s faster than we thought and I think the more that fall, the more we will get since it’s sort of a safety in numbers kind of model and the benefits of cost reduction and focusing on our product from a patient perspective are truly real. So I think we have an exceptional shot of accelerating this RTM categorization process. So, that becomes a full time job and so that means that we can bring in a team from Abiomed that has that experience of scaling and putting process and talent in place to get to that $500,000,000 which is our long term goal. We think we have the product portfolio to do it. So now we’ve basically gone from one guy to two strong teams focused on the two most important aspects which is care and feeding and development of a highly profitable functional sales force along with you know making sure that we get that access point that we want outside of the bundle structure of our competitors.

Caitlin Cronin, Medical Device Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: I think you noted the 25 IDNs. I mean why start with the IDNs and then how where is it what’s the status with the GPOs?

Tony Koblish, President and CEO, TeleBio: Well it’s interesting. So GPOs are very honorable in the way they treat their contracts. So if it’s a three or four year contract, they’re not going to break that contract and just restructure it because you showed up with a bright idea one day, right? So you have to start at the IDNs and what’s interesting is a lot of the IDNs or sub hospital systems that roll up to the GPOs, you know, they have the ability to follow or not follow the GPO and some of those RTM contracts that we have are in IDN systems that roll up to GPOs. So even though we don’t have the RTM categorization in the GPOs yet, we are starting to pick off the substrate organizations that roll up to those GPOs.

So starting where we can, but in time we will have those RTM contracts across everyone else. And of course, we still have one big GPO to get, that’s Vizient, we don’t have that yet and I think that process will start by the end of this year, I believe. They keep delaying it a little bit. But one good thing is there’s a subdivision of Visient called Aptitude which has given us the RTM contract. So, like I said, we’re just chipping away at it until we filter up and get all of them in place.

So that takes some work.

Caitlin Cronin, Medical Device Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: You know with Visient would you see the RTM categorization in place at the time of the Yeah, that that’s did win that? Okay.

Tony Koblish, President and CEO, TeleBio: Yeah, so now that we have this model and the model is simple, we can walk into the hospital, we can show them what we think their usage data is based on our knowledge of competitive contracting structures, show them how their costs are going to rise as competitors switch them from legacy polypropylene to their more natural repair resorbable polymer products, they will invariably go back and check the math, They don’t have great IT screens to see how data changes in real time, but they can go back and see that the tsunami is going to hit them and then they become quite interested in integrating our RTM categorization because our price point is lower than the products that they are being switched over to. So it does allow them to have a good economic benefit and frankly a better clinical benefit. Our clinical data is super strong and we always lead with the patient benefit first.

Caitlin Cronin, Medical Device Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: You know, when you have your commercial team, am I now with Greg really focusing on these contracting relationships, does he have, you know, anyone to help him with that or is it just Greg?

Tony Koblish, President and CEO, TeleBio: Yes. No, we’ve got a great team that consists of six or seven what we call SCR, strategic accounts folks that are covering each one of the regions or every two of the regions that we have in the country. And then we have a great succession plan for Greg. He’s number two, has worked with him for a very long time. So we’ve got a strong market access team and in fact it’s so strong and now that Greg is focused on this RTM, we’re also going to have him start looking at some reimbursement and market access issues in Germany, France, and some other markets that we can help our friends, our team members over in Europe to crack that open because they are doing well in Europe and we think they can do even better.

So there is just going to be a whole new vertical built in the company underneath Greg around market access and that will allow sales, marketing and commercial operations to thrive under really specific, really talented leadership that we put in place.

Caitlin Cronin, Medical Device Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: I mean just on the OUS point, you noted a couple of updates this past quarter with the NHS update as well as the as IHR being I cleared in mean, where do you see OUS going longer term?

Tony Koblish, President and CEO, TeleBio: Yes. I mean, I’ve been very impressed. We have a very strong leader that was with me at my last company running that organization and he’s done it very quietly, hands off as we’ve been focusing on The U. S. Market which is much bigger, but we pick our heads up today and we recognize it’s about 15% of our revenue which is pretty good for a small U.

S. Based medtech company. I think my last company we got to about 10% and we’re pretty happy with that. So 15% is super good. It’s even better when you consider we don’t have the PRS product line over there.

That product got caught on the wrong side of the MDR updates, the regulations. So we’re filing the design dossier for that product by the end of this year. And a lot of the revenue they’re driving is in The UK in large complex applications. So there’s a great opportunity for us to grow outside of The UK which is the next focus while we’re focusing on market access in some of those other countries. And then I think the IHR product will start the process of making us a more holistic hernia player in The U.

K. Getting both the simple and the complex procedures whereas now we’re mostly on the complex. So there’s some good growth legs ahead of us in Europe that will be driven by IHR expansion in The U. K, expansion on Continental Europe and then getting the PRS product into Europe. So hopefully that’s about two or three years of solid runway there.

Caitlin Cronin, Medical Device Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Maybe turning back to the commercial org in The U. S. And Jeff, you know, seems like the sales team was pretty steady quarter over quarter. Yeah. You know, how would you say the new members are ramping?

Is breakeven still about six months?

Tony Koblish, President and CEO, TeleBio: It is. It’s been fairly consistent and it may actually get better in time as our territory manager account specialist model continues to mature. We’re seeing great traction with the account specialists. For example, we had a couple of reps last year that were about $3,000,000 territories. We gave them two or three account specialists to help them and they’re now vectoring towards $4,000,000 territories.

And that story goes right through the stack rank, right? If you look at our 2,000,000 players, our 1,000,000 players, everyone is benefiting from having these associate reps be able to help them drive their business. So I think that has the potential to help us out a lot. And I think we’re going to start to double down in cities and MSAs where we already have good momentum and good access. So for example, in an extreme example, we don’t really have any reps right now in Chicago, which is a sore spot for us, but we will shortly.

They are in Chicago right now today as we speak fixing that situation. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we had two or three reps in Chicago fairly soon. And you look at a place like LA or even Boston or New York where we’ve got you know two or three reps in each one of those cities and you can just see it going and going and going. So I think we put more reps in places where we have momentum sort of adjust territory so that we can fit more in and that may result in a quicker start as well. Now that may be offset by some of the you know, virgin territories that don’t have anything going on yet.

Those may take a little while to go. But I think with the management processes they’re bringing in place, the talent and the nurturing and the messaging, you know, everything is being upgraded, I feel like we’ll get those territories going well. So, let’s say for now six months is about the right still the right timeframe for paying for themselves.

Caitlin Cronin, Medical Device Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: It sounds like Jeff was supportive of the TM and the AS model and so he noted that he wasn’t really making many major changes to the sales force, the structure of the strategy other than having this patient centric approach. How does that differ from I think prior you mentioned it was more of a transactional approach?

Tony Koblish, President and CEO, TeleBio: Yeah. Well, mean you know you can get caught up in you know closing the quarter, we got to deliver this, that. So you wind up with a transactional mindset where you know perhaps you’re more focused on what the supply chain is thinking and doing and we don’t want our reps doing that, we want them in the OR’s working with the surgeons. So you know one of the byproducts of having Greg be that transitional leader you know until we got Jeff on board might have been more of a focus on the transaction and the supply chain, right. So taking a big step back, this is a mission based company, right.

Our mission is to get polypropylene plastic out of people’s bellies. The reason why that mission exists is because before we founded the company I watched plastic being removed from patients and it was the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen, right. You go from a hernia that’s this big to a zone of injury now that’s this big. And I think they’re death defying heroic procedures that just do not have to happen. If you put a reinforced tissue matrix like ours in, you pull that product out, it looks almost like the day you put it in, right, it doesn’t do damage.

So that became my personal mission and it’s now the company’s complete mission. It’s a noble mission and if this company didn’t exist, all of the major players would just be happily pushing cheap polypropylene and we are forcing the issue and everyone, everyone is trying to figure out how to match what we’re saying, what we’re doing, and how to create natural repair solutions. I just found out, you know, the American Hernia Society meeting is coming up and we just found out that every single mesh company that is presenting there and has a booth has asked personally not to be near our booth. So it tells you that we are the disruptor and the pariah and that’s just where I like to be. And I do think we are doing a massive service to patients and to society.

These are terrible operations when plastic mesh has to come out. I can’t tell you how bad they are. They either go in when they ball up in a road or they come out. Either is bad. It hits bad things.

It does bad things. It ruins the patient’s life. So, if we can fix that no matter what happens, I will be happy when I retire. It’s my thing right now.

Caitlin Cronin, Medical Device Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: You know, Jeff also discussed driving medical education initiatives. Are there people that are already in place for that? Or do you need to hire more to execute those?

Tony Koblish, President and CEO, TeleBio: No. Have an excellent, truly excellent medical education team led by Marissa Conrad, who is one of our strongest executives. She runs our clinical programs, has been super productive in developing our clinical data proof sources. So we’re fusing the MedEd program with her. I think it makes sense to have all the data collection and presentation in one place and KOL management and surgeon relationship development all in one place.

So we have the team in place. What we’re probably going to do is adjust the style of what we do, right. So we generally do two to three large 30 to 40 surgeon meetings a year and then I mean a whole bunch of small presentations. We’re probably going to shift away a little bit from cadaver labs and more towards didactic sessions which are a little more cost effective to do and create a little more positive dialogue. I think everyone knows how to do these procedures at this point.

And so it’s probably just reallocation of what’s already in place both from a dollars perspective and a people perspective. One of the things Jeff made very clear on the call is there is no new capital required for his programs other than to pay for himself his teammate that he brought over. We have the envelope of resources required to do what he wants to do. There’s just going to be reallocations within that envelope.

Caitlin Cronin, Medical Device Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: You know, in the medical education program, I think Jeff talked about it being focused on teaching hospitals. Mean is that somewhere where you already have a large presence or would this be

Tony Koblish, President and CEO, TeleBio: a A little little bit, of you know, I mean it’s hard to crack into the teaching institutions when you’re a small company, smaller than we even are today. But we do have some good anchor points at places like MGH, at Stanford, at Scripps, know, there’s a whole range of great institutions in our roster right now. But we need to expand the user base within those institutions. So that’s going to be a primary focus. And then what I’ve noticed is when we do our VIP R and D tours, we bring surgeons in quite a bit to meet with us at the facility and take a look at what we’re doing.

It’s the young attendings, right, that are fresh out of their residency, they’re fresh out of their fellowships. These are the ones that are gravitating towards our technology. So these young attendings are looking to create a niche for themselves in their market when they go out in their own practice. And being a natural repair solution or being a plastic surgeon that focuses on reinforced tissue matrices, I think gives them a differentiating position. And they’re just less tied to what was done in the past.

Sixty years of putting plastic into people, right, it’s a hard habit to break. There’s a lot of inertia structures in place. But these young folks are much more malleable and are ready embrace the new stuff as evidenced by their adoption of the robot, right? I mean, at some point, no one is going know how to sew with their hands anymore. It’s all robotic.

So I think we are the future. Young physicians that come out of these teaching programs and spin out is probably what he was talking about and expanding usage in the institutions that we’re already at.

Caitlin Cronin, Medical Device Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Great. In the last minute, Roberto, I’ll give you some airtime. How are you thinking about just cash burn and OpEx spend going forward? I know on the call you noted kind of flat quarter over quarter OpEx expectations. How are you thinking about that?

Roberto Cucas, CFO, COO, TeleBio: Yes. OpEx should be flat over the course of the year. You saw it was pretty flat from the first to second quarter. And with growth of revenue on top of that, we’re seeing leverage begin to drop to the bottom line. Because of some of the disruptions last year, I think that was a little bit less evident to investors.

So, I think that will become much clearer this year. And you’ll be able to see the trajectory of both operating loss and cash consumption declining pretty precipitously over the course of the year. So we reiterated that we believe we have sufficient cash on hand to get to profitability and that story should become clearer and clearer.

Caitlin Cronin, Medical Device Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Great. You’ve landed there. Thanks both.

Tony Koblish, President and CEO, TeleBio: Thank you for your time.

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