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The bottom level of an office building on Peachtree Road houses a startup reshaping our views on hearing. Inside a nondescript industrial building off 14th Street is a team making surgeries safer. And up in Peachtree Corners, there is an office filled with a team rethinking anemia testing.

Zoom in on Atlanta’s map and you’ll quickly realize just how many impressive medical device startups have set up shop in town.

Local MedTech startups building everything from pediatric tools to wearable sensors are catching national attention and investment dollars. But what’s behind the city’s MedTech growth? Talk to founders, investors, and ecosystem builders in town, and you’ll hear one word over and over again: Collaboration.

Dr. Wilbur Lam (from LinkedIn)

Atlanta has the “raw materials” to make it a national MedTech leader, says Silicon Valley transplant Dr. Wilbur Lam, Professor of Pediatrics at Emory University and Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech. The city has a premiere medical school, a top biomedical engineering program, and large healthcare systems focused on patient innovation. But institutional collaboration is something unique to Atlanta, according to Lam. He said there is now a tangible “push from every level” to make Atlanta a leader in commercialization, medical technology, and therapeutic development.

The partnerships forged between Emory University, Georgia Tech, and the Children’s Hospital of Atlanta cannot be overstated, Lam told Hypepotamus.

“That’s something unique you can’t find in the Bay Area or Boston,” Lam added.

MedTech veteran Martin Williams has witnessed the local MedTech scene grow significantly since he moved back a year and a half ago from the West Coast. As he works on scaling his new venture in the rheumatology space, he pointed to events like the Bioentrepreneurship Networking Happy Hour, hosted at Emory every month, as signs of “collaborative networks” being created across the city.