How MedForward scaled investor meetings at their annual forum

MedForward Health Innovation Forum — Paris, France. Seventh edition. Roughly 1,800 attendees, 95 exhibiting teams, and a sold-out innovation floor of about 2,400 sqm.

Who shows up? Hospital innovation leads and digital health buyers on one side; founders and scale-ups on the other — plus a growing corridor of corporate venture and hospital-linked funds looking for dealflow. What makes it different in health tech is the curated ratio: every startup is pre-screened for clinical relevance, and every investor table is capped so conversations stay serious.

They first came to Sesamers after the sixth edition: operations had hit a wall reconciling 400+ requested intros in spreadsheets while the comms team was still promoting the event. The trigger was simple — the COO refused to run year seven without one system of record for meetings.

We designed the program with MedForward — not for them in isolation. Joint workshops mapped investor theses and hospital priorities, then we ran parallel tracks: outbound scouting, inbound application review, and a shortlist competition for the main stage innovation zone.

On the ground, we co-built the matchmaking session grid: time-boxed pods, jury-selected “fast lane” meetings for top-scoring pairs, and a single operations view so floor managers could see declines and no-shows in real time. Language throughout was co-creation — their team owned the clinical bar; we owned throughput and tooling.