2014
Founded Sonex
Physician / Inventor / Founder
DarrylBarnes
He took the scalpel's blind spot personally - then built the tools to fix it.
He took the scalpel's blind spot personally - then built the tools to fix it.
Darryl Barnes spends his days arguing with a stubborn idea: that some surgeries have to be big. Through Sonex Health, the company he co-founded in 2014, he has spent more than a decade proving the opposite. The pitch is almost rude in its simplicity - take a procedure that used to mean an operating room, anesthesia, and weeks of recovery, and do it in a clinic office with ultrasound as the eyes.
His title has read both CEO and chief technology officer, which tells you something. He is the rare founder who can sketch the device, defend the patent, sit across from the patient, and then walk into a board meeting and explain the unit economics. Most people pick a lane. Barnes built the road.
The company he leads is based in Eagan, Minnesota, with roughly 90 employees and a single, unfashionable obsession: making the smallest possible incision the standard one, not the heroic exception.
Role: Co-Founder, CEO & CTO, Sonex Health
Based: Greater Saint Paul, Minnesota
Trained at: Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic
Also studied: Cornell (Exec Leadership), Wharton (CTO Program)
Known for: Co-inventing UltraGuideCTR
The origin story is the kind venture capitalists pretend they invented. In 2014, Barnes teamed up with fellow Mayo Clinic physician Dr. Jay Smith and healthcare administrator Aaron Keenan. They were, in the company's own words, "brought together by a shared desire to create safe, effective treatments to common orthopedic conditions" - people with "big visions but humble beginnings." The first workshop was Barnes's garage.
What came out of that garage was UltraGuideCTR, a single-use, hand-held device that lets a physician perform carpal tunnel release under real-time ultrasound, watching the anatomy instead of guessing at it. Barnes is a co-inventor. The point was never the gadget for its own sake. The point was the trade: a procedure that historically meant a trip to the operating room could move to the clinic, and a recovery measured in weeks could shrink to days.
That is the quiet radicalism of his career. He is not trying to invent a new disease or a new market. He is trying to take something common and make it smaller, cheaper, and faster to recover from. It is a deeply unglamorous mission, which is exactly why it works.
Barnes did not arrive at entrepreneurship by way of a business school whiteboard. He arrived by way of patients. He completed his residency at Mayo Clinic and his fellowship as a Clinical Mayo Scholar at Cleveland Clinic, then practiced non-operative orthopedics and sports medicine at Mayo Clinic Health System in Albert Lea-Austin, Minnesota. There he also served as medical director and president of the medical staff - leadership roles that meant he understood the system he would later try to reshape from the inside.
He had also done this dance before Sonex. Earlier inventions he developed while on staff at Mayo Clinic were licensed to Tenex Health, where he went on to serve on the Medical Advisory Board and as associate medical director of education. By the time the garage prototype existed, Barnes had already learned the hard part: turning a clinical hunch into a thing other doctors will actually pick up and use.
"Big visions but humble beginnings."
A hand-held, ultrasound-guided device Barnes co-invented to bring carpal tunnel release out of the OR. FDA-cleared, and the cornerstone of the company.
Real-time ultrasound replaces the surgeon's blind spots. The whole bet is that visibility lets you make the incision smaller, not bigger.
Sonex's stated goal: be the world leader in ultrasound-guided surgery, reducing invasiveness, improving safety, and lowering the cost of care.
Practices non-operative orthopedics and sports medicine at Mayo Clinic Health System; serves as medical director and president of the medical staff.
Inventions developed at Mayo Clinic are licensed to Tenex Health, where he joins the Medical Advisory Board and serves as associate medical director of education.
Co-founds Sonex Health with Dr. Jay Smith and Aaron Keenan, building the first prototypes in his garage.
Named Medical Devices CEO of the Year and Most Outstanding Health Tech Innovator, Upper Midwest USA, by CEO Monthly.
Featured in a Medgadget interview discussing the company's minimally invasive devices and approach.
Sonex Health closes a $40M Series B led by KCK MedTech, bringing total funding past $60M, to expand physician and patient access.
Plenty of doctors have a clever idea. Almost none of them then enroll in Wharton's Chief Technology Officer program and pick up an executive leadership certificate from Cornell to make sure the idea survives contact with a balance sheet. Barnes did. It is the move of someone who refuses to hand his invention to a "real" executive and hope for the best.
That double fluency shows up in the recognition. Being named Medical Devices CEO of the Year for the Upper Midwest is not a clinical award - it is a builder's award. It says the device works and the business around it works too. For a founder who started in a garage, that is the whole game.
Medicine: Mayo Clinic residency, Cleveland Clinic fellowship as a Clinical Mayo Scholar.
Business: Cornell Executive Leadership certificate, Wharton CTO Program alumnus.
He holds numerous patents for medical device technologies now used nationwide.
He co-founded a medical device company out of his own garage - the cliché, but lived.
He has carried the titles of CEO and CTO at the same company, refusing to split the inventor from the operator.
Before Sonex, his inventions were already good enough to be licensed to another medtech company.
He went back to school - Cornell and Wharton - after years of practicing medicine, to learn to run the thing he built.
His entire career is a bet on subtraction: smaller incisions, shorter recoveries, lower cost.
"Be the world leader in ultrasound-guided surgery."