JONATHAN ROTHBERG

COFOUNDER, HYPERFINE

founding and selling two DNA sequencing companies for at least half a billion dollars in the early 2000s, entrepreneur and inventor Jonathan Rothberg took on the challenge of bringing medical imaging to the twothirds of the world who don’t have it. In 2015, Rothberg, the founder of medical device incubator 4Catalyzer, took a team of scientists and engineers out on his yacht/floating laboratory and (somewhat jokingly) told them they couldn’t return until they figured out how to make a low-cost MRI machine that you could wheel into a patient’s room. In February 2020, the resulting product, Hyperfine’s Swoop system, became the first portable, bedside MRI machine cleared by the FDA for imaging the heads of patients over the age of 2. (It was later cleared for younger children, too.) At $50,000, 20 times cheaper than a traditional MRI machine, the Swoop has already sold nearly 50 units, shipping as far as Pakistan and Uganda. Leveraging innovations in semiconductor design that Rothberg pioneered in a handheld ultrasound device called the Butterfly iq, the Swoop MRI uses a lower-strength magnetic field than a fixed MRI machine and plugs into a standard wall outlet; combined with a unique system for preventing radio frequency interference, that means it can be used in any hospital setting. Traditional MRI machines can only be used inside a specially shielded room. “The sickest patients, in the ICU, can’t be wheeled anywhere,” Rothberg says. In its emergency rollout to hospitals in New England last year, the Swoop was able to detect Covid19-related neurological abnormalities in unconscious patients. In January, the FDA cleared Hyperfine’s deeplearning software to identify telltale indicators of stroke or traumatic brain injury. After raising $90 million in a February 2021 Series D round, Rothberg aims to integrate portable MRI with robotic surgery, starting with Mri-guided robotic biopsies.