By Jeremy Koff, senior consulting editor
June 30, 2026 | There has been a wealth of acquisitions in the neurotechnology and related medtech industries in recent months. Two of the largest acquirers have been Boston Scientific, which has picked up Axonics, Nalu, and Valencia Technologies, and Medtronic, which acquired SPR Therapeutics for over $600 million last month.
Executives from both major strategics offered their insights on the M&A outlook at the recent Medtech MVP conference in Minneapolis, MN earlier this month. The conference was produced by Cambridge VIP, the parent company of Neurotech Reports.
Keynote speaker at the conference was Medtronic chairman and CEO Geoff Martha. In an interview with Amrinder Singh of Vensana Capital, Martha framed the current landscape as one in which medtech companies must think beyond individual devices and toward broader ecosystems that combine technology, workflow, data, access, and outcomes.
“But I do think the ecosystem is critical, whether you’re talking about a longitudinal chronic disease management or a surgery or a procedure for the reasons of just creating lower costs, better outcomes and access,” Martha said. “These ecosystems will mitigate some of those workup issues that we have and improve access.”
Martha also pointed to neuroscience as a major long-term opportunity for engineered solutions, particularly because pharmaceutical pipelines remain limited in many neurological and neurodegenerative conditions. “I think over the next 10 to 20 years, it’s going to be neuroscience—and pharma doesn’t have any kind of a healthy pipeline for neuroscience, neurogenic conditions,” Martha said. “It’s going to be an engineered solution and I see a lot of potential for that. I’m bullish, but we’ve got our work cut out to prove to the investment community that the fundamentals are there and some of the things they’re worried about, they are a bit overblown—or a lot overblown.”
That theme was reinforced in another panel, “How Medtech Incumbents Scale Innovation through M&A and Partnerships,” which featured Chris Eso, vice president and global head of corporate and business development, M&A, and ventures at Medtronic, and Charlie Attlan, senior vice president of new business development, corporate strategy and portfolio at Boston Scientific. Both companies made clear that external innovation remains central to their strategic growth. “When it comes to innovation, we look at it both organically and inorganically,” Eso said. “We look at M&A as just an extension of our R&D pipeline.”
Eso said Medtronic starts with markets and unmet needs, then evaluates whether the best pathway is internal development, partnership, venture investment, or acquisition. He described Medtronic as a “big advocate of early engagement,” beginning in some cases with venture investment, then moving into structured transactions and eventually acquisition when appropriate.
Attlan described Boston Scientific as a company whose revenue base is deeply tied to acquisitions, while emphasizing that acquired technologies often require years of internal development, clinical work, regulatory execution, and commercial iteration before they become major franchises. He noted that Boston Scientific was founded in 1979 and that “most of our revenues today are from acquisitions,” adding informally that the figure could be “like 95%, if you really go back.” But he also emphasized that the distinction between acquired and internally developed revenue can become blurred over time.
As an example, Attlan pointed to Watchman, which Boston Scientific acquired through Atritech in 2010, years before the product became a large franchise. Watchman, he noted, was approved in the U.S. five years after the acquisition and continued to benefit from extensive internal planning, R&D, and commercial execution.
The most directly relevant neurotechnology commercialization case study at Medtech MVP came from Noctrix Health, the developer of Nidra, a wearable Class II therapeutic device for restless legs syndrome. Noctrix founder and CEO Shriram “Sri” Raghunathan appeared on the “Tech Inside Medtech” panel shortly after the company’s acquisition by ResMed.
“Noctrix is a therapeutic wearable medical device going after the second most common sleep disorder in the world”, said Raghunathan. “Call it the most common disease you’ve never heard of. Restless leg syndrome impacts one in 10 Americans.”
Noctrix is notable not only because it is a noninvasive neurostimulation company in sleep medicine, but also because it built its commercial model around durable medical equipment, direct patient demand generation, payer processing, and vertically integrated patient support. Raghunathan said the company made a deliberate decision to own the patient experience from beginning to end.
“We chose to do this very carefully,” Raghunathan said. “It was a strategic decision to own that patient experience front to back. A lot of medical device companies historically don’t do that.”
That strategy gave Noctrix visibility into the full patient and commercial funnel, including patient acquisition, prescription flow, prior authorization, insurance processing, device setup, patient support, and outcomes. It also created opportunities for automation and AI that may be less visible to companies selling primarily through hospitals or surgical channels.
In an interview with NBR, Raghunathan discussed the company’s reported $340 million exit to ResMed, one of the largest for a noninvasive neuromodulation exit. He also noted that, similar to Bioness Inc., Noctrix had obtained durable medical equipment reimbursement at approximately $5,000 per device. That payment level is significant for the neurotechnology sector because many noninvasive or wearable neuromodulation companies have struggled with low reimbursement or cash-pay models. A DME pathway at that approximate level, assuming low COGS and high margins, can fundamentally change the commercial profile of a home-use or clinic-based neuromodulation device.
Noctrix also offered one of the clearest examples of AI as an operational tool rather than simply a product feature. Raghunathan said DME remains an archaic sector dominated by paper and fax, creating abundant opportunities for automation.
“At Noctrix, we didn’t see this as like, ‘Hey, I need to bring in AI into the company,’” he said. “So it was more of we’re in an industry, we operate as a durable medical equipment supplier, DME. DME is dominated by wheelchairs, catheters, bed pans, hospital supplies. And it is an industry that’s archaic, dominated by paper, fax. So the opportunities were just plenty.”
He encouraged medtech executives to experience their own “AI WTF moment,” arguing that the technology becomes easier to understand once leaders see its direct impact on productivity and workflow. He said that once companies gain trust in the tools, AI changes from something perceived as replacing people to something that enhances productivity.
“I think it changes from like, ‘Hey, this is replacing people to more like, this is giving me a superpower to do 10X more,’” Raghunathan said.
Robert Greenberg, chairman and CEO of huMannity Medtech, also emphasized the importance of distinguishing between large language models and machine learning or data science. For implantable electronics, Greenberg noted that therapeutic sensor data has long been central to product development. The newer excitement around LLMs is real, but it should not obscure the longer-running importance of physiological data, closed-loop systems, and device-derived information. “In our case, we do a lot of implantable electronics and so the sensor data that we’re able to collect and use on the therapeutic side is something that we’ve been doing for a long time,” Greenberg said.
In in a later discussion with Greenberg, he stated the following, “It is not possible to do much AI on the implant since battery life is limited, so instead we have made our implants Bluetooth-enabled so they can access the cloud.”
For neuromodulation, that distinction is critical. The most valuable forms of AI may not be chatbots or generative text tools, but algorithms that improve stimulation targeting, patient selection, closed-loop control, digital phenotyping, trial design, and long-term therapy optimization. The relevant data are often physiological, behavioral, procedural, and device-generated.
The CEO-only forum, where roughly 100 medtech CEOs gathered just prior to the main conference sessions, included C-suite insights on how AI is integrated. We asked the question how AI was being integrated into their business both from a product and operations side, and whether it impacted headcount. While the panelists seemingly avoided the headcount portion of the question, there was general consensus that the most impacted area of AI integration from the product perspective was in developing software, and from an operational corporate perspective, for streamlining human resource function.
Across the two days, a consistent message emerged: neurotechnology companies must think simultaneously like medical device developers, data companies, reimbursement strategists, and scalable service organizations. The companies that succeed may be those that integrate therapy, workflow, data, payer strategy, and patient support into a cohesive platform.
Medtech MVP did not present neuromodulation as a separate silo. Instead, it showed how neurotechnology is being pulled into the broader evolution of medtech. Strategics want platforms rather than isolated products. Investors want capital-efficient companies with credible exit paths. AI is becoming a tool for development, operations, and commercialization. Reimbursement can determine whether a wearable or noninvasive neurotechnology remains a niche product or becomes a scalable therapy.
