The problem
Tremor, Parkinson’s, fibroids, and bone-metastasis pain confront patients with a cruel tradeoff: drugs that lose effect, or open surgery with incisions, hospital stays, and long recoveries. For deep-brain targets there was no middle path — nothing between a pill and drilling the skull.
How it works
An occupier-company headquartered in Haifa (Occupied Palestine), selling to hospitals worldwide — not a Palestinian company. Insightec’s Exablate and Exablate Neuro focus hundreds of ultrasound beams to a millimetre-scale point inside the body, ablating the target while MRI guidance and live thermometry watch the temperature in real time. Led for years by CEO Maurice R. Ferré, the company commercialised the platform indication by indication — essential tremor first — working with physicians, hospitals, and regulators across the US, Asia, and Europe from offices in Dallas, Tokyo, and Shanghai.
Pain points
Drug-refractory tremor patients with nowhere to go once medication failed; neurosurgery backlogs and patient fear of open brain operations; hospitals needing a differentiator for movement-disorder programs without building new operating theatres.
Business model
Systems plus recurring value: sell the Exablate Neuro suite into MRI-equipped hospitals, then earn service contracts and procedure-linked revenue as tremor, Parkinson’s, and fibroid volumes scale.
Challenges
Frontier hardware burns cash: a $101M loss in 2023, negative equity of $78M, a 30% revenue drop, 100 layoffs (20% of staff) in December 2023, a SPAC merger at $1.9B that never closed, and a June 2024 round at a $375M valuation — down from $1B. Each new brain indication also demands years of trials and regulatory review.
Funding
- Raised: $150M Series E in December 2017 led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (backers incl. Elbit Imaging, York Capital, GE Healthcare); $150M equity round in June 2024 led by Fidelity Management & Research, co-led by Nexus Neurotech Ventures and Ally Bridge Group.
- Valuation: $375M at the June 2024 round (per Elbit Medical disclosure via CTech), down from $1B.
Latest — Jun 2024
On 19 June 2024 CTech reported Insightec’s $150M equity financing — led by Fidelity with Baillie Gifford, Catalio, and others joining, while the Koch family (then ~40% owners) sat out — six months after the company cut a fifth of its workforce.