2022, Innovators: Nadim Yared has led Brooklyn Park-based CVRx since 2006. Its signature product, Barostim, is an implantable device that uses neuromodulation to treat heart disease. While the company was still private, he steered it to approximately $400 million in financing. But in 2018, Yared says, the company was on the brink of shutting down. Barostim secured FDA approval the next year, and now the company is ramping up sales. It went public in July, netting $144.9 million. Looking back at the long road, Yared says, “Medical discovery is not always a straight line.” 

2014, Overachiever: Any medical device company that lands venture financing in the current risk-averse climate has something to brag about. Given that, Nadim Yared of CVRx Inc. may be the king of the hill among start-up med-tech CEOs, after obtaining $113 million in debt and equity financing to support a Phase III clinical trial and commercialization of its Barostim NEO device—one of the nation’s biggest med-tech financings of 2016. Efforts to battle chronic heart failure with nerve stimulation devices, however, have a checkered past, and in the coming months investors will be focused on the results of a pivotal clinical trial for Barostim called BeAT-HF (short for baroreflex activation therapy for heart failure).