Business

Giancarlo Beukes (left) and Gokul Nair

While their fellow classmates headed overseas or took banking or consulting jobs upon graduating, Gokul Nair and Giancarlo Beukes did something an increasing number of students are opting to do – they started a business to solve one of the world’s many problems. Today, the former UCT biomedical engineering Master’s students run Impulse Biomedical, a medical devices spin-off that since 2018 has raised over R60mn in investment and today has 14 employees, including a number of PhD and Master’s students from the university. The startup has developed two devices – the ZiBiPen, a re-usable adrenaline auto-injector, and the Easy Squeezy, an easy-to-use sleeve attachment for asthma inhalers.

Pharmaceutical company Cipla recently placed an order of 20 000 units of the inhaler, while Nair and Beukes are now assessing whether it’s possible to manufacture the ZiBiPen locally following the completion of a clinical trial on the product.