Dave Fritzsche, Founder & CEO
Dave founded MidAmerica Ventures to provide executive leadership, business development and investment services to smaller, emerging companies in the medical device, healthcare services, emergency medical services (EMS), and health & safety industries. He has a wealth of executive management experience across sales & marketing, business development, and operational roles at several leading firms, and has delivered exceptional results for both start-up and Fortune 500 companies.
An initial investor in start-up medical device company Defibtech, Dave drove explosive revenue growth through different stages of Defibtech’s evolution and development over a 20-year period. As seed investor and advisor (1999-2003), VP Sales & Marketing (2004-2007), VP Business Development (2008), outsourced business development executive (2010-2014), and again as VP of NA Sales (2014-2019), he was a key figure in taking Defibtech from unknown start-up to major AED industry player. He and his team delivered NA revenue growth from $1M in 2003 to over $15M in 2007, when Defibtech was named as the fastest growing medical device company in the U.S. by Deloitte & Touche USA. From 2010-2014, he forged new distribution partnerships with industry giants W.W. Grainger, Medline, HD Supply, MSC Industrial and VWR, among others. This combined record of hyper growth and expanded partnerships was a major factor in the firm’s acquisition in 2012 by Nihon Kohden Corporation, a leading global manufacturer, developer and distributor of medical devices based in Japan, with subsidiaries in the U.S., Europe and Asia and products in 120 countries. In 2014, Dave was brought back to Defibtech to drive renewed growth and develop new markets. He developed Defibtech’s commercial strategy and entrance into the emergency medical services (EMS) space, and successfully
launched its new resuscitation device-the Lifeline ARM. Under Dave’s leadership from 2014-2019, Defibtech NA revenues grew from $22M to over $32M.
Prior to Defibtech, Dave served in several leadership roles at Big 4 consulting firm CapGemini Ernst & Young (1999-2004), where he sold and managed multi-million-dollar supply chain and technology implementation projects to clients such as Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. and Takeda Pharmaceuticals, and managed CGE&Y’s strategic alliance with Ariba, a leading eProcurement technology company later acquired by IBM. Dave began his career at W.W. Grainger (1992-1999), where he learned B2B distribution from the ‘ground up’ while serving in various roles in operations, sales and consulting.
Dave lives in Winnetka IL with his wife and 3 children, and is an avid tennis, platform tennis, and ice hockey player. He holds a BA from Middlebury College where he was a 4-year letterman in both Varsity Football and Varsity Hockey, and an M.B.A. in Finance, Marketing and Management and Strategy from Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate school of Management.