Every March, Austin, Texas becomes the temporary capital of the global startup world. South by Southwest draws thousands of founders, investors, and technology executives from more than 100 countries, and the SXSW Pitch competition — now in its 18th year — has become one of the most watched startup showcases on the planet. Since 2009, more than 730 companies have competed. Over 80% of them went on to raise funding. Combined, SXSW Pitch alumni have generated more than $22 billion in venture capital and exits. Siri was a SXSW Pitch startup. So was Foodspotting, Tango, and dozens of other companies that quietly shaped how we live today.
This year, Boston had a winner.
Surgicure Technologies, a female-founded medical device company based in Boston, took home the Healthcare, AssistiveTech & BioTech category award at SXSW Pitch 2026 — beating out four competitors from across the US and Europe in what organizers described as the highest caliber applicant pool since the competition began. The company was selected out of more than 600 applications reviewed by the SXSW Pitch advisory board.
The product that won is called the Horseshoe. It sounds deceptively simple: a horseshoe-shaped airway securement device designed to hold breathing tubes in place inside a patient’s mouth. But the problem it solves is anything but simple. Right now, the standard method for securing endotracheal tubes in intubated patients — the breathing tubes used in ICUs, operating rooms, and emergency settings — often relies on medical tape and improvised workarounds that were never designed for the job. Unplanned extubations, where a breathing tube dislodges accidentally, are one of the most preventable and dangerous complications in hospital care. They can cause cardiac arrest, brain damage, and in roughly 30% of preventable cases, death.
Surgicure’s Horseshoe replaces the tape. It is a patented, adjustable device that anchors to the patient’s back molars rather than the skin, providing stable, reliable tube securement without causing the facial pressure injuries or dental damage associated with existing alternatives. Originally conceived by U.S. Army respiratory therapists working in battlefield trauma settings — where a dislodged breathing tube can mean the difference between life and death in seconds — the device was redesigned and commercialized by Irena King, Surgicure’s CEO and founder.
King’s background is one of the more compelling founder stories in Boston’s medtech scene. She holds a PhD in Medical Engineering and Medical Physics from Harvard-MIT’s Health Sciences and Technology program, was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, and has conducted research at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, MIT, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She also holds a Healthcare Certificate from MIT Sloan. The company was founded in 2019, joined the Techstars Boston Accelerator in 2024, and one year ago — almost to the day — closed a $1.785 million seed round led by Launchpad Venture Group, with participation from eight additional investors including Beacon Angels, TiE Angels, and BakerBridge Capital.
The SXSW win lands at a meaningful moment for the company. Surgicure is currently advancing commercialization of the Horseshoe across hospital and military care settings, and the category win puts it in front of the kind of investor and healthcare system attention that is difficult to manufacture through other channels. SXSW Pitch alumni have been acquired by Google, Apple, Meta, and Michelin, among others — and 22% of all funded alumni have been acquired by a major global firm.
For Boston’s medtech community, the win is a reminder that the city’s deepest competitive advantage is not just scale — it is the pipeline that runs from Harvard and MIT labs through accelerators like Techstars and into companies like Surgicure, solving problems that have existed in hospital rooms for decades and that no one thought to fix until a founder with the right clinical insight and the right engineering background decided to try.
