For our April Member Spotlight, we’re featuring CQuence Health, an organization helping healthcare companies make a positive impact on patient outcomes through strategic guidance, professional services, and investment capital.
Tell us about your company.
CQuence’s mission is to shape the future of healthcare. We exist to support growing healthcare companies that are dedicated to making a meaningful difference in healthcare. Many of these companies are founded by healthcare professionals or passionate entrepreneurs who have personally experienced the challenges of the healthcare system. With over 40 years of expertise in healthcare, we provide strategic guidance, professional services and investment capital to help them succeed.
Cassling is CQuence’s flagship portfolio company, united by a vision to improve healthcare access and outcomes, together we aim to impact 1 billion patient lives by 2030.
Cassling was founded in 1984 by Bob Cassling. A U.S. Air Force veteran, Bob was committed to taking better care of customers than the big manufacturers. In 1985, Bob’s son Mike Cassling joined the company, and in 1996, took over as president.
Originally operating in five Midwest states, Cassling expanded in 2013 and 2014 into the Southern and Western U.S. As a result, Cassling has grown to become Siemens’ largest partner in North America for medical imaging. Mike Cassling appointed Kyle Salem, PhD as President in 2017, and in 2023 Kyle was named CEO. In 2024, Cassling celebrated its 40th year in business, providing innovative healthcare solutions to healthcare organizations and the communities they serve.
In 2011, Mike Cassling founded CQuence Health to expand the company’s ability to impact the healthcare community. Built on Cassling’s passion and proven track record of helping healthcare organizations meet their needs in an ever-evolving industry.
Today, CQuence Health and Cassling are proudly employee-owned. In 2025, CQuence’s founder, Mike Cassling, transitioned the company to employee ownership, ensuring the company is able to preserve its culture of integrity and innovation while keeping decision-making rooted in Omaha. This reflects Mike’s long-standing commitment to service to our employees, portfolio companies and the community. Our people now have an even more personal, vested interest in delivering the high-quality service excellence the healthcare industry has come to expect from us.
Why is Nebraska an important location for your company?
Nebraska is an ideal base for innovation. The state offers a robust healthcare ecosystem supported by organizations like UNMC, UNeMed, UNeTech, among many others. This established ecosystem fuels the development of emerging solutions and technologies.
Being rooted in Omaha allows us to attract and retain employees who share our mission while fostering collaboration with our close-knit community. The relationships we seek are long-term, transparent and focused on a mutual good, ideals we share with the state of Nebraska.
Back row: Chad Brough, VP of Growth; Bruce Stec, VP of People & Culture; Randy Wobig, Chief Information Officer; Mike Haywood, CFO
Front row: Tana Phelps, VP of Marketing; Kyle Salem, PhD, CEO
What products/services do you offer?
CQuence provides strategic guidance, professional services and investment capital to growing healthcare companies at every stage of their journey. Leveraging our firsthand experience starting and scaling healthcare companies, we take a long-term, customized approach to match each business’s unique needs.
Beyond investment capital, we act as a hands-on partner and advisor to healthcare CEOs and founders, offering mentorship, facilitated strategy sessions and competitive insights. Areas of focus span everything from mission and culture to regulatory compliance, funding strategy, sales and marketing, talent acquisition and exit planning.
We also empower healthcare companies to focus on their mission by providing a comprehensive suite of back-office and operational support, including accounting and finance, IT, human resources, marketing and branding, fractional sales leadership and market research. This allows our partners to contain costs, build a competitive advantage and offload operational burden so they can focus on patient impact.
How many employees do you have in Nebraska? Company-wide?
Across CQuence and Cassling, we have almost 200 employees. More than half are located in Nebraska.
How does your company support the bioscience industry?
Within our current portfolio, we support companies working across critical areas of the healthcare industry, including telehealth, digital pathology, medical waste management and referral processing.
We help emerging healthcare and healthtech companies move from concept to market. Our new Steel Works Health Accelerator, launched in partnership with UNeMed and UNeTech, is a direct investment in Nebraska’s bioscience pipeline, guiding early-stage healthcare startups through the critical regulatory, strategic and commercial questions they need to answer to scale.
What are some of the biggest challenges facing your industry today, and how does your company play a role in helping overcome those challenges?
The rapidly evolving nature of healthcare makes it highly prone to challenges. A few of the more common challenges facing healthcare today include access gaps, care fragmentation, the complexity of bringing new solutions to market and the difficulty of scaling innovation beyond well-resourced health systems.
CQuence addresses these challenges by identifying and backing companies with practical, impactful solutions and giving them the strategic, operational and financial support to grow, and ultimately improve healthcare access and outcomes for patients.
What’s on the horizon for the rest of 2026?
Our 2030 goal to impact 1 billion patient lives drives everything we do. In 2022, we launched our Lives Touched Calculator, a live ticker tracking patient lives impacted by CQuence’s portfolio companies. Today, that ticker shows nearly 221 million lives touched.
1 billion lives is a big number. We know that we can only achieve so much when we work alone, that’s why we work alongside innovative companies who share our passion for shaping the future of healthcare.
We are continually growing our portfolio and client partnerships to enhance our ability to make a broader impact through their solutions. Within our current portfolio, we support companies working across critical areas of the healthcare industry, including telehealth, digital pathology, medical waste management and referral processing.
Our newest portfolio company, CareCubes, is a strong example of how we expand impact through our partnerships. CareCubes provides rapidly deployable, negative-pressure isolation environments that help healthcare facilities quickly contain airborne infectious diseases. It’s a simple solution that solves a complex problem. Carecubes’s technology has the potential to radically change healthcare outcomes for not just hundreds of people, but millions at a time, when you consider the widespread impacts of infectious disease in both developed and developing nations.
This year, we’ve partnered with UNeMed and UNeTech to launch the Steel Works Health Accelerator to foster the talent we have here locally in Omaha. Over 16 weeks, founders move through carefully structured modules to transform ideas into credible, market-ready businesses. This program launched in early March, with a cohort of six local healthcare startups looking for mentorship and guidance navigating complex subject areas in healthcare, from refining strategies to navigating regulatory challenges. Our team will guide these startups through the critical questions they must answer; but aren’t necessarily yet equipped with the experience to do so. As an Omaha-based, employee-owned company, we’re committed to keeping talent and innovation rooted in Nebraska, while fostering solutions that can scale nationally and globally. We’re excited that it builds on Intellectual Property developed close to home.