Special Edition 2025 Spark Design Challenge Newsletter
Give Your Idea a Bit More Room to Grow - August 31st is Right Around the Corner!
Here's What You'll Discover in this Newsletter
- October 15th Webinar: Unlock Tax Savings You Didn't Know You Had
- The Voler Systems 2025 Spark Design Challenge - The Winners are In!
Let's Chat About Your Next Medical, Wearable or IoT Device Design
Voler has helped many premier clients turn device ideas into reality. Whether you are looking for Medical Device or Wearable Technologies, Industrial IoT Device Designs, Electronic Support, Hardware/Firmware/Software, Wireless, Sensors, Motion Control, Microprocessors or FPGA Development, Voler can help you along the journey – always with a focus on keeping risks low, and keeping projects on-time, on-budget, and easy to manufacture.
Sign Up for Our Upcoming Webinar
"Unlock Tax Savings You Didn't Know You Had. Discover Hidden Benefits for R&D and Innovation."
There are massive tax breaks for small and medium size businesses that are now a permanent part of the tax code!
It’s not only how much you make but how much you keep that matters.
Tributan Founder Patrick Shelley will cover all things tax, and highlight aspects of the R&D credit that are now available for startups.
Topics to be covered:
🔷 Tax changes in recent legislation, and how they might impact your business
🔷 R&D credit for startups
🔷 What qualifies, and how to take advantage
🔷 Help reduce your burn rate and extend the runway
Wednesday, October 15th, 2025
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM Pacific Time
Back at the beginning of the summer, we launched our latest competition this way:
"Have a bold idea in electronics, hardware or firmware? Voler Systems is proud to announce our 2025 Spark Challenge, your opportunity to ignite and bring that concept to life! This year, we’ll be awarding two winners with $10,000 each in professional engineering support."
About 50 startups participated, and on September 15th, after much deliberation, the four judges at Voler Systems selected these two organizations as our winners of the 2025 edition of the Spark Design Challenge:
Winner #1: NearWave
In the words of the CEO of NearWave, Roy Stillwell:
“NearWave helps oncologists select the right chemotherapy for their breast cancer patients. Using light and our AI platform, we can tell within a week if a therapy is working, rather than having to wait 3-to-6 months. This allows physicians to stop or to change therapies, which saves patients months of toxicity – especially for the 30% of women that do not respond to cancer therapies.
We have deep technical experience: the leadership includes PhDs from Notre Dame and Stanford. We also have software infrastructure expertise: folks in our team have built internal data tools at large organizations.
The FDA has given us a thumbs-up, so we are raising a seed round of $2M for our 510k FDA submission and also to productionize our systems.”
How will NearWave utilize the free engineering hours that have been awarded by Voler Systems?
“NearWave is finishing its design freeze for our first 510k submission and will be leveraging Voler's expertise to get a set of expert eyes on the final designs.
We are also developing the next-gen model, and will leverage Voler's expertise in designing towards manufacturability, as we scale.”
Winner #2: H3Pelvic
In the words of the CEO of H3Pelvic, Zack Lyon:
“H3Pelvic Therapy Systems exists to provide better women’s healthcare through dignified, patient-centered solutions to victims of pelvic pain. Our technology enables safer, lower-cost, opioid-free and personalized solutions to battle twenty different pelvic pain-inducing conditions. (And not just for women, but for men too!)
Because the H3Pelvic system is remotely monitorable and can be deployed almost instantly, it will enable better “hospital-at-home” types of solutions. H3Pelvic provides instant non-opioid pain relief techniques that offer safer Thermal Modulation Therapy aimed at intense and aggravating chronic and acute conditions. Ultimately, we are enhancing the patient-physician relationship, and offering true health equity.
Human-centric, Holistic, Harmonic - we are H3Pelvic®”
How will H3Pelvic utilize the free engineering hours that have been awarded by Voler Systems?
“We hope to leverage the award to bring our current MVP’s closer to a commercially-ready device. We have TEC drivers, fan and pump speed controls along with NC sensing circuits that have been built in C++. We have the code on GitHub along with a notional user interface built in REPLIT.
It would be ideal to leverage these efforts to bring the device to the next level of real functionality. Bluetooth for the base platform to communicate with Android OS and RFID sensors on probes are two other features that we will possibly wish to explore with Voler.”
We would like to thank all 2025 Spark Design Challenge Participants.
🎉Congratulations to NearWave and H3Pelvic! 🎉
Let's Chat About Your Next Medical, Wearable or IoT Device Design
Voler has helped many premier clients turn device ideas into reality. Whether you are looking for Medical Device or Wearable Technologies, Industrial IoT Device Designs, Electronic Support, Hardware/Firmware/Software, Wireless, Sensors, Motion Control, Microprocessors or FPGA Development, Voler can help you along the journey – always with a focus on keeping risks low, and keeping projects on-time, on-budget, and easy to manufacture.
