Bio-Ultrasonic Medicine
Anuj Bhardwaj
He took the ultrasound tech that inspects jet engines and aimed it at the human spleen.
The founder who turned down the volume on inflammation.
He took the ultrasound tech that inspects jet engines and aimed it at the human spleen.
Anuj Bhardwaj runs SecondWave Systems, a Minneapolis-St. Paul medical device company with an unusual product and an even more unusual claim: that focused sound, delivered by a device you wear, can calm the kind of chronic inflammation that puts millions of people on lifelong drug regimens. No needles. No implant. No pills. Just low-intensity focused ultrasound, aimed with precision at the spleen.
The device is called the SecondWave MINI. It is the centerpiece of what Bhardwaj and his co-founders describe as bio-ultrasonic medicine, a field that barely existed when they started and that they are, in large part, trying to invent. In April 2025 the company closed a $7 million Series A led by Treo Ventures. That round sits on top of more than $15 million in non-dilutive government research funding from agencies including DARPA, the NIH, and ARPA-H.
Bhardwaj is the CEO, and he is an engineer first. He earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Penn State and both an MS in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA from MIT. For the past five years he has spent his days at the seam where high-performance ultrasound meets wearable medical therapy, a seam almost nobody else was working.
In 1977, Bhardwaj's parents founded The Ultran Group. It made industrial ultrasound equipment for non-destructive testing - the machines that scan aerospace components and, later, lithium-ion batteries for hidden flaws. It was a good business. It had nothing to do with medicine.
Bhardwaj grew up around it and eventually worked in it, including a stretch as Director of Strategy and Business Development. But he kept looking at the same transducers everyone else used to check for cracks in metal and asking a different question: what if you aimed this into a body instead of a machine? Around 2018, he and his Ultran team began investigating whether low-intensity focused ultrasound could reduce inflammation by stimulating the spleen. Early collaborations with Medtronic researchers in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area helped turn the hunch into a foundation.
A noninvasive, wearable device sits against the body - no surgery, no implant.
Proprietary low-intensity focused ultrasound targets the spleen with precision.
The focused energy stimulates neural and immune pathways to dial down inflammation.
The goal: an intelligent, home-use version patients administer themselves.
Rheumatoid arthritis is the beachhead. Bhardwaj is blunt about why the market exists: a large share of patients get little or no relief from the standard biologic drugs, and those drugs carry cost and side-effect burdens of their own. A wearable that works without systemic immunosuppression, he argues, is a win for patients, providers, and payors alike. SecondWave's first-in-human study showed a significant reduction in RA disease activity - the result that turned government grants into private investment.
Per Bhardwaj: "One-third of RA patients don't respond to the standard biologic treatments."
Bhardwaj's parents found an industrial ultrasound company for non-destructive testing in aerospace and, later, batteries.
Bhardwaj and his Ultran team start investigating focused ultrasound as an anti-inflammatory therapy targeting the spleen.
He co-founds the company with medical-device operator Jeff Heyman and University of Minnesota neuroscientist Dr. Hubert Lim, and becomes CEO.
SecondWave secures over $7M from the US Department of Defense to accelerate its low-intensity focused ultrasound therapy.
A $7M round led by Treo Ventures funds the next clinical study of the SecondWave MINI, moving toward home use.
"If our device can help patients manage their symptoms with fewer side effects, it's a win for both patients, providers, and payors."
"Having a strong interdisciplinary team has been crucial. I think that's what has made us so successful over these last few years."
"Our team is dedicated to improving patient quality of life for millions of Americans suffering from chronic inflammatory disorders."
Bhardwaj credits the team, not the tech, for the traction. The founding trio is deliberately mismatched in the best way.
The engineer-operator. Hardware, ultrasound physics, and the business logic that turns a physics demo into a company.
University of Minnesota endowed professor with two decades in neuromodulation and translating science into medical devices.
Nearly 20 years commercializing medical devices, including time at Philips Healthcare. The one who ships.
The endgame Bhardwaj describes is a wearable with enough built-in intelligence that a patient can treat themselves at home, no clinic visit required. That is the difference between an interesting therapy and a scalable one. It is also the reason the Series A exists: to run the next clinical study and push bio-ultrasonic medicine from proof-of-concept toward something a person can actually buy and use.
Along the way the company has collected the badges that signal a serious medtech play - selection for the NIH Blueprint MedTech program, a spot in Johnson & Johnson's JLABS, and Fogarty Innovation's accelerator. Bhardwaj is not promising a miracle. He is promising an option for the people the current options miss.