On March 20, 2017, Jacques Essinger’s company was heading for the Paris stock market. Symetis had launched its initial public offering, with completion expected eleven days later. On March 30, the plan changed: Boston Scientific would buy the business for $435 million in cash. The offering stopped. An executive who had been preparing a company for public shareholders was now preparing it for a new owner.
There is enough drama in that calendar to satisfy a transaction lawyer, a profession accustomed to finding suspense in a closing condition. But the more revealing detail comes next. Before the acquisition closed in May, a set of assets was spun out. That business became Polares Medical. Essinger became its co-founder, chief executive and chairman. His next beginning was already under way while the previous chapter was acquiring its final signatures.
Before the boardroom, a piece of software
To understand the distance he had travelled, go back to 1989. Essinger was an R&D director with a background in physics and biomechanics from EPFL in Lausanne. He had worked in the United States. His next step would bring him together with Jean Plé, an industry executive, and Jean-Manuel Aubaniac, a professor at the University of Aix-Marseille. In July, the three founded Symbios in Morges, in Switzerland’s canton of Vaud.
The founding group combined different sorts of experience. Essinger’s contribution included a very tangible piece of work: within months, he produced the first version of Makestem. The software connected custom design with manufacturing on digitally controlled machines. Long before his name appeared beside an acquisition price, it was attached to code that helped a young company make something.
That early assignment gives his later career a useful point of reference. A software program has to survive contact with the machine it is meant to serve. A company must eventually coordinate many more moving parts. The move from one responsibility to the other can look smooth on a biography, where a new title requires only a new line. In practice, the scope of the job changes considerably.
A company becomes the assignment
Essinger’s early American experience included directing research and development at MPDI, a start-up that later became part of General Electric. In 1996 he started Medos Medical System in Ventura, California, as a US subsidiary of Geneva-based SODEM Medical Systems. The geography of his working life was already crossing the Atlantic before Polares would put Lausanne and Palo Alto on the same company letterhead.
In 1997, he joined Modex Therapeutics as chief executive and a board member. This brought a different collection of responsibilities. He led the business through venture financing rounds and a Swiss Exchange IPO in 2000. Modex then merged with the Netherlands-based IsoTis in 2002, followed by the GenSci transaction in 2003. An executive’s calendar could contain an operating decision one day and an ownership question the next.
At IsoTis, his remit reached beyond setting overall strategy. He also held direct responsibility for selling and marketing the company’s products. The title of chief executive can sound pleasantly removed from the details. His responsibilities put him close to the question every business eventually faces: how does the work inside the company meet the world outside it?
A listing and a merger also ask different things of a leader. A listing brings public shareholders into the picture. A merger brings organizations together. Essinger had worked through both before taking charge of Symetis in 2004. By then, his experience included starting a business, establishing an overseas operation, raising money and managing changes in corporate structure. The engineering education had acquired a substantial commercial appendix.
A job offer with room for a family
One episode at Symetis makes the work of building a team unusually concrete. Essinger wanted to recruit engineer Stéphane Delaloye. They met in the bar of Zurich’s Hotel Schweizerhof. Delaloye had an established job, and the proposed move presented a geographical problem: the work was in Lausanne, while his family would remain in Zurich.
Essinger offered an arrangement combining time in Lausanne with working from home in Zurich. It made room for the person he wanted to hire. “Ich wusste, dass ich Stéphane brauchte,” he recalled: he knew he needed Stéphane. Delaloye joined in 2006.
The scene is useful precisely because it is so ordinary. The obstacle was a family’s location; the response was a working arrangement. Before a business can benefit from someone’s expertise, that person has to be able to take the job. Recruitment occasionally asks the chief executive to become a practical geographer.
The ten days before the signatures
By the time Symetis announced its sale, it had become an international organization with manufacturing in Switzerland and Brazil. Revenue reached CHF38.4 million in 2016. Its Paris offering had been intended to fund further development, including investment in manufacturing capacity and the expansion of its business. The company preparing to list was a considerable distance from a small team trying to recruit its next engineer.
The March 30 agreement gave that organization a different route forward. Boston Scientific’s acquisition was announced as an upfront cash transaction. When it closed on May 16, Symetis became part of a division of the larger company. The distinction between agreement and closing matters: March supplied the announcement, while May completed the change of ownership.
The $435 million figure belongs to the corporate transaction. It measures the announced price for the business that Essinger had led. It also compresses years of work into a number small enough to fit in a headline. Manufacturing, recruitment, financing and commercial expansion occupy rather more space when someone has to carry them out.
“My thanks to the Symetis team for their collective achievement.”
Jacques Essinger, on the Tech Tour award, 2017
When Symetis received the Tech Tour 2017 Medtech Award, Essinger described a twelve-year journey and thanked the team. That wording fits the scale of the undertaking. A chief executive is the person a transaction story can conveniently name. The organization being acquired contains the work of many people, accumulated over many years. His public acknowledgement gave the colleagues their place in the sentence.
The company after the company
Polares emerged from the Symetis transaction with its own independent future to arrange. Essinger’s co-founder, Alex Khairkhahan, leads alongside him; the current leadership roster lists Khairkhahan as chief operating officer and chief technology officer. The company maintains its headquarters in Lausanne and US operations in Palo Alto. The Swiss-American route that appeared in Essinger’s earlier career had become part of the new business’s organization.
In a 2024 conference presentation, Essinger explained the connection himself. He described Polares as a spin-out from Symetis and discussed the Palo Alto operation led by Khairkhahan, which he visited regularly. The account supplies a helpful bridge between the two company names. A sale can settle the ownership of one business while a separate project still needs its own management, financing and years of work.
The financing announcements mark the progress of that independent chapter. Polares closed a $25 million Series A in 2018. A $40 million Series B followed in 2020, led by Longitude Capital with participation from existing investors. On March 3, 2026, the company announced a $50 million Series C. Each round was a financing for the company at a particular stage of its development.
Three rounds. An ongoing business.
The investors have a geography, too
The 2020 round also shows how far the company’s financing network reached. Alongside Menlo Park-based Longitude Capital were Decheng Capital, Endeavour Vision in Geneva, IDO Investments in Muscat, Earlybird in Berlin and Wellington Partners in Munich. A business with operations in two countries had drawn backing from a wider collection of places. Essinger’s role sat at the intersection of that investor group and the company it supported.
By 2026, the announced Series C included participation from DC Global Ventures, Lumination Partners, existing investors and a new strategic investor. The announcement described the round as oversubscribed. The membership of a financing group can change as a company develops; the chief executive remains responsible for explaining the business those investors are being asked to back.
There is a long distance between writing an early software version and bringing together a financing group across countries. Essinger’s career contains both assignments, with the operating work between them. Look across the company names and the job keeps changing scale: first a technical contribution, then a team, then an organization with overseas operations and outside shareholders. At Polares, those responsibilities meet in the same executive role.
“I won’t remain inactive”
Back in 2017, asked what would follow Symetis, Essinger offered a short assurance in French: “Je ne resterai pas inactif, c’est certain!” He would not remain inactive. The remark was modest about the particulars and clear about the direction. The subsequent Polares chapter gave it a company name, a management team and a series of financing announcements.
His career now connects a piece of software written for a newly founded company with responsibility for an organization operating on two continents. Along the way came a public listing, mergers, a recruitment conversation in a hotel bar and a sale that interrupted another listing. Those events resist the tidy idea that a professional life progresses through an orderly succession of doors. Several can be open at once.
Essinger remains co-founder, CEO and chairman of Polares. The 2026 financing places his current company firmly in the present tense. The Symetis transaction is a completed event; Polares continues to make demands on the executive who helped establish it. For someone whose work began close to the machinery, there is a familiar obligation in that arrangement. Another business needs building. He has taken the job.