AMT Medical is a Utrecht-based medical device scale-up developing a minimally invasive approach to coronary artery bypass grafting – one of the most performed and risk-laden procedures in cardiac surgery. Founded in 2017, the company has adapted a proven neurosurgical technique to allow surgeons to create a heart bypass without stopping the heart, opening the chest, or connecting a patient to a heart-lung machine. AMT Medical is a member of the EIC Scaling Club’s Cardiovascular Therapies market group.

We spoke with Rutger Tulleken, Founder and CEO of AMT Medical, to learn how a family story spanning two generations of medicine set the company in motion, how the team has navigated the particular demands of cardiac device development, and what proving the technology in patients has meant for the scale-up’s trajectory.

A bypass without stopping the heart

In conventional coronary artery bypass grafting, the steps are as dramatic as they are routine: the chest is opened, the heart is stopped, and the patient’s circulation is handed to a heart-lung machine while surgeons stitch bypass connections by hand – twelve to sixteen sutures on an opening twelve millimetres wide, a technique that takes a decade to master and still carries meaningful risk. AMT Medical replaces this with a clip-and-laser-catheter system that creates the same bypass connection without interrupting blood flow for a single moment.

The principle, known as non-occlusive anastomosis, means the aorta is never clamped and the heart never stops beating. This removes one of the procedure’s most serious hazards: when the aorta is clamped, dislodged plaque can travel to the brain. It also eliminates the heart-lung machine entirely, with a profound effect on recovery. Patients treated with AMT Medical’s technology are typically walking out of hospital within two days and returning to work within weeks – compared to weeks in hospital and months of recovery under the conventional approach.

“With our technology, you always have the same reproducible, safe bypass. It’s better for the patient – low risk, fewer complications. And it’s also better for the healthcare system: no ICU, and they can leave the hospital in a few days instead of a few weeks.”

The system is designed for ease of adoption as much as safety. Because the anastomosis is created mechanically rather than by hand, surgeons can learn the technique in a matter of days rather than years – making reliable outcomes far less dependent on individual skill.

Chemistry, family, and a father’s breakthrough

The origins of AMT Medical are inseparable from a family story. Rutger’s father, Professor Cornelis Tulleken, was a neurosurgeon at University Medical Center Utrecht who spent years developing a way to bypass an artery in the brain without stopping blood flow even briefly – a feat previously considered impossible. He called the technique Elana: Excimer Laser Assisted Non-Occlusive Anastomosis. By the early 2000s, the procedure was saving around 40–50 patients a year at the UMC Utrecht: people who had arrived from across the world with giant aneurysms and no other options.

Rutger – who had spent his career reviving struggling companies, turning them around and restructuring them – was asked whether he could help find funding for the technology. He went on to commercialise the brain application through a predecessor entity, achieving both CE and FDA approval. Then came the next question: if this non-occlusive principle could work in the intricate space of the brain, could it be adapted for the heart – where the potential patient population is not in the dozens but in the millions?

Rutger founded AMT Medical in 2017 to answer that question, attracting a small founding team and building out steadily from there. Today, the company employs around 30 people across clinical, regulatory, and production functions. Rutger is candid about where his own strengths lie, and about where the weight of the organisation sits: “Production is really important. Regulatory is really important. And clinical – we have people who know the heart surgeons around the world.”

Manufacturing is currently handled in-house, including within AMT Medical’s own clean room, though the company is in active discussion with two external partners to take on production at greater scale as volumes grow.

From first patients to clinical proof

The defining challenge for any medical device company is the distance between a technology that performs in a laboratory and one that has been validated in human patients. Investors, Rutger explains, draw a sharp line at this divide.

“When a product is not tested in a human, everything can go wrong. When it is, the world goes open. People who didn’t want to talk to us are now calling me – can I invest?”

AMT Medical reached that inflection point in 2022, when Phase I of the clinical trial was completed. Phase II followed with a further 75 patients. On the cumulative results, Rutger tells us: “We had to prove the technology has the same long-term outcome, at a year of follow-up, as the normal bypass in an open setting. And in this study, we’ve proven to be as good as the normal bypass – even a little bit better.”

The clinical success has been matched by financing momentum. AMT Medical received an EIC Accelerator grant of €2.5 million in 2022, and in April 2025 closed a Series B round of $25 million, with the EIC Fund participating as a new investor alongside Invest-NL and other backers. Securing regulatory approval for the cardiac indication – from both the FDA and CE authorities – remains the central milestone ahead, and the team’s regulatory function is central to that push.

Rutger is also keen to emphasize Europe’s role in his company’s success. Without public funding, he says, AMT Medical would not have come as far as it has. He is equally clear about the broader ambition: to build European medical device companies of real scale rather than seeing the continent's technology absorbed, as so often before, by larger American players.

In the Champions League final

Rutger came to the EIC Scaling Club having fielded many programme invitations and learned to be selective about where to invest his time. His impressions have been shaped by two things above all else.

The first is the credibility the membership confers. Within the deep tech scale-up community, the EIC Accelerator already carries a strong reputation – and selection for the Scaling Club carries additional weight.

“Among companies like ours, people see the EIC Accelerator as the Champions League of grants. And when you are in the EIC Scaling Club, you’re really in the final. People hear it and it gives you a lot of credibility – towards shareholders, towards strategics, towards other companies. It gives trust.”

The second is the quality of the mentorship – and the candour of the feedback. “The mentors are really high professionals,” Rutger explains. “They put you a little bit under pressure. They’re not really nice to you – but that’s what you need when you’re growing. You need some criticism, not only to hear you’re doing well. I like it very much.”

About the EIC Scaling Club

The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120 European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.

The top 120 European deep tech companies have been carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.

The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.

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