By Jorge Mercado Monday, June 23rd, 2025

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s startup scene has only gotten stronger over the past decade and another example of that is De Oro Devices, a company founded by students in 2018 that sold to Drive DeVilbiss Healthcare in early June for an undisclosed amount.

“I feel excited for the future. Honestly, I think Drive is an incredible team and I’m super excited to work with them and see what we can do together,” Co-founder, president and CTO of De Oro Devices Sidney Collin told the Business Times.

“I think we can have a really big impact with this product, with their team, with their resources. I’m feeling reallyoptimistic about the whole thing.”

Collin founded the company alongside William Thompson. At the time, she was finishing her undergraduate degree while Thompson was finishing his Master’s of Business Administration at Cal Poly.

Collin, a biomedical engineering student at Cal Poly, developed the NexStride, a device aimed at helping a local veteran, Jack Brill, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease and had a mobility symptom called freezing of gait, which stopped him from being able to walk.

Nexstride is a small device that attaches to a walker or cane and emits visual and auditory cues to help with mobility.

Collin had never really envisioned herself as an entrepreneur. 

“I was a full-on engineer at Cal Poly. I had no interest in business,” Collin said.

But once she recognized how big the problem was for people with mobility issues and that she could help, Collin became interested in business and learned all she needed to from Cal Poly.

Collin credits the mentors and resources through Cal Poly’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Small Business Development Center.

Reminiscing about the past, Collin recalled her first time pitching the company at Cal Poly’s Innovation Quest for a chance to win some startup money.

“We did not win and for good reason,” she said with a laugh. “We had a cool idea, but we did not have a business.”

Instead of shying away, however, Collin and her co-founder embraced what they didn’t know and joined Cal Poly’s accelerator program to learn how to make De Oro a business.

By 2019, the duo succeeded. De Oro Devices was a 2019 finalist at Cal Poly’s AngelCon competition which showcases six startups duking it for startup funding.

This time around, De Oro Devices did win and took home $100,000 in funding as a prize. By 2020, the company’s Nexstride device hit the market and slowly but surely, De Oro kept stacking up wins.

The company raised about $1.5 million from angel investors over the next couple of years and in 2022, raised another $3 million in seed funding to take the company to the next level.

“I think our biggest win as a company over these last few years has been being able to give this produce to people who need it,” Collin said.

“They have told us how this device has changed their life and that’s the thing I appreciate the most.”

De Oro Devices has five patents approved, it’s Nexstride product sells in seven countries including the U.S. and have been sold both direct-to-consumer and business-to-business.

Collin believes the acquisition by Drive will help get the product to even more people. Drive DeVilbiss is a manufacturer and supplier of medical aids including mobility devices like walkers, canes, etc.

Originally, Drive was a customer of De Oro, and Collin said that after a certain point, “It made sense to be more than that.”

“The impact with Drive’s resources, their reach and their knowledge of the market will help us get to so many more people faster and be able to help have that much bigger of an impact,” Collin said.

Collin will also remain involved in ensuring Nexstride reaches people, as she has joined Drive as Vice President of Product Management.

Overall, Collin is happy with De Oro Devices’ life as a company. While she wasn’t expecting an acquisition necessarily, she knew partnering with Drive made too much sense to pass up.

She was also very appreciative of all that Cal Poly did to help her in her quest. She noted that even despite living in Texas now, the majority of the company’s angel investors were from Cal Poly and most of her mentors, staff and more were somehow connected to the university.

She added that the Central Coast as a whole is a special place, noting that Inogen founders were also a huge support to her and De Oro.

“San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties are incredibly unique. There are some really incredible companies that come out of here and its a community that is super supportive of one another and I think that is really special,” Collin said.

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