Overcoming systemic barriers
Dr. Elizabeth Clayborne is beating the odds.
Since she started fundraising in 2021, Clayborne said she’s raised $3.25 million for her medical device company, NasaClip. As a biracial Black woman, the numbers aren’t necessarily always on Clayborne’s side — in 2021, startups founded by Black women received just 0.34% of venture capital funds nationally — but she wants to be more than the exception.
“I really want to knock it out of the park with NasaClip to show other women and people of color they can be successful in business — but also to show investors that investing in people from my demographic is not charity,” Clayborne said. “I’m here to bring a return on their money and have a successful business and I am very confident that I’ll be able to do that.”
Clayborne, an emergency room doctor, came up with the idea for NasaClip during her last year of residency at The George Washington University, where she was also chief resident, in 2015. She describes NasaClip, which has adjustable pinch pads and intranasal sponges, as the Band-Aid of nosebleeds.
During residency, Clayborne learned that emergency rooms see about 500,000 visits a year for nosebleeds, or about one in every 200 ER visits. She said while most patients probably don’t need to see a doctor to stop the bleeding, people can pinch the wrong part of the nose, tilt their heads backward instead of forward or fail to maintain constant pressure. When the blood doesn’t stop pouring, they often panic.
“For us as physicians, it was a really kind of usually simple issue to take care of but really cumbersome, because we didn’t have anything to give them while they’re waiting,” Clayborne said. “Because they’re a lower-acuity patient, they would sometimes have to wait for hours.”
Maryland has some of the highest ER wait times in the country; in 2022, patients spent an average of nearly four hours in ERs before leaving.
Dr. Maurice Reid, an investor in NasaClip who founded ExpressCare Urgent Care Centers, said it could help alleviate those conditions.
“This product could immediately be applied and control the bleed in the waiting room which would help to decompress the ERs and get other patients who have more serious conditions seen quicker, too,” Reid said.
Clayborne said nosebleeds “definitely can be tackled at home.” NasaClip can be purchased online. Clayborne also sells the product, which officially launched at the end of 2023, to physicians, ERs, urgent care centers, sports trainers and school nurses, she said, with plans to expand to airlines, cruise ships and EMS departments.
When Clayborne first started fundraising for NasaClip, she was taking small checks of about $5,000 from physician colleagues. About 80% of her investment comes from the Black community, she said.
Pamela Queen, a professor of finance at Morgan State University, said many women entrepreneurs have to crowdsource funding from family and friends because they’re denied traditional funding at banks. She said Clayborne raising $3.5 million is “very rare” and “extremely good” for a business owned by a Black woman.
For the $4 million seed round Clayborne is currently fundraising for, minimums have risen to $250,000.
Queen said women, and particularly women of color, continue to face disparities in raising money, a sentiment echoed by Troy A. LeMaile-Stovall, CEO of TEDCO, which invests in Maryland-based technology companies.
“The reality of it is that all entrepreneurs have to take multiple ‘no’s’ before they get to a ‘yes,’ but Black women and people of color have to take 5-10 times more ‘noes’ before they get to a ‘yes’ than their white counterparts,” LeMaile-Stovall said.
In addition to her CEO duties, Clayborne works about once a week at the UM Capital Region Medical Center in Largo, which she said keeps her humble and grounded. Clayborne also helps train residents as an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
During the first wave of COVID-19 in 2020, Clayborne continued to treat patients despite being pregnant. It’s the tenacity she brings to both NasaClip and the ER that earned her a shoutout from Gov. Wes Moore during his second State of the State address Feb. 7, which Clayborne said was “really magical.”
“As a woman of color, she struggled to find capital to get her idea off the ground,” Moore said. “But Dr. Clayborne doesn’t give up.”
Clayborne, a 40-year-old single mom living in Laurel with her two daughters, wants to continue to shine light on the positive.
“I never think that you should limit your life by thinking you can’t have it all. Like I truly believe that I can be a mom, I think I’m going to remarry; I plan to have a spectacular life where I positively impact the world that I live in,” Clayborne said. “And I think that I can do that successfully and be happy while I do it. And I just want to instill that belief in other people.”