President and CEO of Northern Arizona Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology’s (NACET) Russ Yelton is stepping down and transitioning into his next role as CEO for Pinnacle Transplant Technologies (PTT) – a Phoenix-based biologics company known for making allograft tissue.
Yelton has been an icon of entrepreneurship in Northern Arizona as he and the NACET team established a leading incubation program, LaunchBox student incubation program, AZ Core Labs, Native American Incubator Network and youth entrepreneurship summer camps as well as head up Startup Weekends. He will transition into his new role May 26th and Annette Zinky will serve as interim President and CEO of NACET.
“I have very much enjoyed my time with NACET and in Flagstaff,” Yelton said, “I am looking forward to new challenges knowing that the NACET team will continue to serve our clients and the community.”
Turning to Pinnacle Transplant Technologies, Yelton has been a mentor to PTT for the last eight months and looks to continue to help build a solid foundation to support future growth.
“I’m extremely excited to be with Pinnacle. Our product impacts many lives and makes a difference. My role is to grow the company more than it already has in the last years 3 years,” Yelton said.
President and executive director PTT, Gabe Hyams comments, “We are absolutely ecstatic to have Russ come on. He comes with a tremendous vision, corporate leadership and wonderful sense of corporate culture. He has tremendous knowledge of the local landscape, legislature and opportunities that we had not realized.”
PTT is on a roll, they have expanded into a 25,000 sq-ft facility, added 25 jobs in the last 12 months and expect reach 60 by the end of the year, were winners of Invest Southwest Venture Madness taking home $30,000, and have seen significant growth in revenue in the last year.
“We’ve had an 89 percent increase in revenue year after year up to 2013 and our first quarter of this year is already 41 percent greater than 2013,” Hyams said, “We are anticipating a third quarter launch of AUXANO-which is a DBM putty used for the regeneration of bone for orthopedic and spinal surgery.”
“We also just had our first international sales contract with a company a large pharmaceutical company in South Korea,” adds Yelton.
Read more coverage on Pinnacle Transplant Technologies here
DBM photo provided by PTT
