Ten Years. One Mission.

By Lisa Owens

As Compact Medical rounds out the first 10 years of its history, I sat down with company co-founder, Jonathan Merrell, to tell the company’s story and ask his reflections on this milestone.

Compact Medical did not begin in a conference room or as part of some grand business plan. It began, instead, in a hospital—during a quiet overnight moment in a NICU, when a troubling reality surfaced in a conversation between Jon and one of his fellow physicians.

“As doctors, we know how to save peoples’ lives,” Jon’s colleague explained, “but without the right equipment in hand, we’re not much better at lifesaving than lay people.”

“That conversation stayed with me,” he reports. “And it sparked a journey that would define the next decade of my life, making lifesaving equipment more compact and more accessible.”

Jon focused on the bag-valve-mask, or BVM. “I wanted to create something a clinician could carry in their pocket and have immediately available.”

The challenge sounded straightforward on paper: redesign the BVM and make it more compact, but as Jon explains, “I then had to ask myself—how do you improve something that has been the standard of care for decades?”

He described those early days as a time of experimentation: sketching ideas and building rough concepts of what would eventually become the ButterflyBVM. Jon was soon joined by co-founder, Adam Scott, through an opportunity at Purdue University. Today, as COO and Vice President,  Adam’s practical engineering skills, sharp mind, and passion for the work has helped propel the company to its current heights.

But the most important breakthroughs did not come from grit or brainstorming. They came from listening.

For example, the most critical pivot in the ButterflyBVM’s history came several years into development during a conversation with Dr. Bill Magee, the founder of the global charity, Operation Smile. Jon’s father, Dr. Craig Merrell, was both an early backer of Compact Medical, and a veteran of Operation Smile’s medical missions. He facilitated a meeting between Jon, Adam, and Dr. Magee that would forever adjust the company’s trajectory.

During the conversation, Jon and Adam mentioned in passing that improper ventilation with a BVM can harm patients—and, in some cases, even kill them.

Dr. Magee stopped them and said, “I don’t care how small this thing is. What bothers me is the idea that my loved one could be harmed by a device meant to save their life.”

A small comment with significant weight.

“It became clear in that moment that we didn’t just need to build a smaller device,” Jon told me. “We needed to build a safer one.”

From there, the road became longer and more difficult: failed prototypes, features abandoned after months of development, slow handoffs to manufacturing, and the persistent challenge of explaining a clinical problem that many providers understood intuitively, even when the data did not always capture it neatly.

“There were plenty of moments when alternative career paths looked appealing,” Jon confesses.

Along the way, the team leaned heavily on frontline providers, learning directly from clinicians who understood the realities of emergency care better than anyone. They also immersed themselves in gBETA, an accelerator program offered by the state of Indiana, enabling them to build not just a product, but a business capable of bringing that product to the people who needed it.

Then, after years of iteration and persistence, in April 2025 the company reached one of its defining milestones: FDA clearance.

“It was a huge moment,” Jon reports. “But it still wasn’t the most meaningful moment.”

That moment came in a simple phone call.

“On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving 2025,” Jon said, “I received a call from an EMS chief in the greater Indianapolis area informing me that the ButterflyBVM had been used on its first patient, an elderly woman in cardiac arrest. The team reported great satisfaction with how the ButterflyBVM had cared for this patient, and even more importantly, the patient survived transport to the hospital and was eventually able to go home and enjoy another holiday season with her family.”

“Of course, the ButterflyBVM was just one component of all the excellent care her team provided her, but it’s immeasurably humbling and satisfying to realize a thing that we have given almost 10 years of our lives to creating made a tangible difference in extending the life of another human. How neat is that!?”

Since that day, the Butterfly BVM has now been purchased by hundreds of agencies across the United States and used in other patients with great success.

As our conversation turned to the company’s tenth anniversary, Jon’s tone widened from personal reflection to shared gratitude. He was quick to point out that that essential milestone does not belong to him alone.

“This milestone belongs to everyone,” he said. “It belongs to Adam, our spouses, our early investors, our consultants, the Hope Center of Indianapolis, our manufacturing partners, our extended family members, and to every early believer who refused to accept the status quo alongside us.”

After 10 years, Jon is proud of what the company has accomplished. But he does not see the anniversary as a finish line. “Now that we’ve proven the concept, our goal is to make safer manual ventilation the standard of care globally. Ten years from today, I hope that no one is satisfied with using a BVM that doesn’t offer the kind of safety controls that are now standard in our product. Whether they are using the ButterflyBVM, the next gen of the ButterflyBVM, or someone else’s invention, no one should settle for things as they currently stand.”

And that, perhaps, is the clearest lesson from our conversation: the story of the past ten years is about refusing to accept preventable harm, about enduring the long stretch between idea and impact, and about building something that can give patients what matters most—more moments, more memories, more time.