Rivanna Medical
For healthcare providers dedicated to elevating their standard of care and enhancing patient safety, RIVANNA develops and commercializes world-first, imaging-based medical technologies. Our automated clinician-assistance solutions help improve decision-making, clinician workflows, health outcomes, and patient satisfaction. RIVANNA is a privately held designer, manufacturer, and distributor of medical technologies and services based in Charlottesville, VA, and holds more than 38 global patents and patent applications protecting ultrasound-based innovations. We operate an FDA-registered and ISO 13485:2016 certified manufacturing facility where we produce the Accuro product line and related medical equipment and components.
Company details
Find locations served, office locations
- Business Type:
- Manufacturer
- Industry Type:
- Medical Equipment
- Market Focus:
- Globally (various continents)
About us
With a toaster oven, a trailer hitch, and deer-spine phantom, the initial Accuro prototype was a functional ultrasound scanning system due to resourcefulness and shared vision and responsibility.
History
Rivanna Medical, LLC (“RIVANNA”) was founded in 2010 by graduate students at the University of Virginia. Co-founder Will Mauldin initiated the founding of RIVANNA after taking a course at the Darden School of Business as a Ph.D. student in Biomedical Engineering (BME). Will saw an opportunity to apply his expertise in medical ultrasound technologies to address the high failure rates associated with the placement of epidural and spinal anesthesia. Fortunately, one of Will’s fellow BME graduate students had a long history of industrial product development experience, and so Kevin Owen was recruited to round out the team and formally establish the company.
With no company facilities or funding, early development efforts were performed in Kevin’s home attic, including assembly of the first circuit boards in a toaster oven. Will devised a system using a trailer hitch and hot glue to inexpensively manufacture the first ultrasound transducers and shot a deer to make a spine phantom. Encouragingly, this initial prototype was a functional ultrasound scanning system and was tested in the deer spine phantom. Although this early stage development was not clinically useful, the basic concept and preliminary data were sufficient to attract RIVANNA’s first outside funding from Wallace H. Coulter Foundation. Private seed investment followed, which allowed Will and Kevin to lease office space and hire the company’s first employees. From that point onward, RIVANNA continued to grow by improving product technology and obtaining subsequent rounds of funding until the Accuro product obtained FDA clearance and started the commercialization process in 2015.