After Intuitive, Shockwave and Avail, Daniel Hawkins is now CEO at AI-powered MRI software startup Vista.ai

2024-03-19

IPO

Palo Alto, California-based Vista.ai (founded and incorporated as HeartVista) makes AI-guided software for automating magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) exams. “Vista is the only MRI-related AI company that is not doing just post-processing — Vista actually controls the MRI machine to produce better images,” Hawkins said in an interview with MassDevice. “It does processing in real time, but very importantly, it controls the actual acquisition of the images to optimize the diagnostic yield that can be had from an MRI scanning process.” Vista.ai was founded by Chief Medical Officer Bob Hu, Chief Architect and Head of Research Juan Santos and Chief Technology Officer William Overall. Its advisory board includes Stanford University doctors and professors and the radiology chair at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The company won FDA 510(k) clearances for its HeartVista Workstation with RTHawk application software for the acquisition of real-time and accelerated images from GE Healthcare whole-body MRI systems in 2014, 2017 and 2017. In 2019, the FDA cleared the company’s AI-assisted One Click MRI acquisition software for cardiac exams with GE scanners. The company updated its software to be compatible with Siemens Healthineers’ MRI scanners for another clearance in 2021. HeartVista raised a $9 million Series A round in 2020 and rebranded as Vista.ai in 2022 under former CEO Itamar Kandel in a move to reflect its wider focus beyond the heart. “We’re starting in cardiac and we’re going to move along to brain and spine, and prostate, breast, kidney, liver, and continue,” Hawkins said. “And if you imagine having consistently higher diagnostic yield, consistently greater quality and consistently faster images, then the average person won’t need to wait so long for their MRIs. You will not have the weight and burden of that interrupting the care pathway. Those are the reasons why I decided this was the right opportunity over the ones that were in front of me over the past couple of months.” Hawkins said longtime investor Khosla — which also has Synchron, Vicarious Surgical and Guardant in its portfolio along with DoorDash, Instacart and OpenAI — has already committed to a Series B round, which could total in the $15 million to $20 million range. Vista.ai recently hired a VP of sales and is staffing up a sales team with plans to build a marketing team to move toward commercialization. The 510(k) pathway is the most likely route through regulatory review, he said. “From a development standpoint, the next areas of focus are prostate, brain, spine, and with that a whole suite of scan capability,” Hawkins said. “And one should think of those as 2025 events. … Our goal is to be commercial in 2025 with those capabilities.” Hawkins launched the marketing and sales department for Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci surgical robot (which just released its fifth-generation system) and then co-founded and led Shockwave Medical as CEO. In 2017 he founded Avail Medsystems, which developed an operating room telepresence system that lets surgeons collaborate in real-time with experts around the globe. Avail shut down for lack of funding last year despite hundreds of system placements around the start of 2023 and a deal with Medtronic Neurovascular. Avail sold its technology to medical robotics startup Mendaera, which is developing a fist-sized system for procedures including percutaneous instruments. “The commonality between Intuitive, Shockwave, Avail and now Vista is market creation,” Hawkins said. “I led the process of creating the market early on for Intuitive. At Shockwave, we created a whole new market in vascular intervention. And Avail, that’s precisely what we did: created a brand-new market. It was financing that took us out of the game. We were just a casualty of what happened in the financing markets last year.” “And at Vista, what we’re doing again is using technology to advance healthcare, but very importantly, creating a new market,” he continued.” Medical Design & Outsourcing: Intuitive co-founder Dr. Fred Moll and Daniel Hawkins discuss the digital OR