Use case

How MedForward scaled investor meetings at their annual forum

Hospital innovation teams and digital health startups meet at MedForward’s forum — but 400+ intro requests in spreadsheets was unsustainable. They moved matchmaking to mytradeshow.ai: one grid, confirmed meetings, and planning links both sides trust on event day.

420+
Meetings scheduled
68%
Less ops time vs. prior year
4.7/5
Satisfaction (meetings)

About MedForward

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 .

The Challenge We Faced

From our side, this was not a plug-and-play rollout. Health events are heavily regulated in how data is shared — we could not treat attendee lists like a generic tech meetup. The vertical is narrow enough that “relevant startup” means something precise : stage, geography, evidence, and hospital fit all mattered. Timeline was aggressive: six weeks from kickoff to first curated longlist , overlapping with sponsor commitments that were already public. The organizer also insisted on maturity bands — no seed-stage companies in certain investor pods — which meant our scouting rubric had to be explainable to their board.

What We Built Together

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.

The Numbers That Matter

186
Startups scouted
540+
Applications reviewed
420+
1:1 meetings run
4.7/5
Satisfaction (meetings)
68%
Less ops time vs. prior year

“We finally stopped playing calendar Tetris in the final week. The floor team trusted the grid because it was the same data founders and investors saw in their planning links.”
Jordan Ellis — Head of Programs, MedForward (demo persona)

Year After Year

Year 1
Pilot: scouting + shortlist for one investor track; 120 curated intros.
First single source of truth for confirmations
Year 2
Added competition format + innovation zone layout co-designed with sponsors.
+35% applications with same review headcount
Year 3
Scaled matchmaking grid across two halls; integrated declines and no-shows into ops tooling.
68% less manual reconciliation time

Next edition

Next edition: expand to a second city hub, double the investor pods, and run a joint “hospital challenge” track with three anchor systems — target 650+ structured meetings.