Peter Martin

Every garage-stage medical device company has a tinkerer. Siesta's is Erik van der Burg, a co-founder with more than 75 patents to his name and 25 years of building things that go inside people. What van der Burg needed was someone to turn a clever idea into a product that hospitals would buy, regulators would clear, and surgeons would trust. That is Peter Martin.

Martin came to the 2009 founding with 15-plus years already logged in medical device operations. He had been CTO and VP of R&D and Operations at Paracor Medical. Before that, VP of Operations and Quality Assurance at Coalescent Surgical, the kind of credential that comes with a footnote: Coalescent was acquired by Medtronic. He had cut his teeth in operations roles at W.L. Gore and Prograft Medical. The pattern is consistent. Martin is the person who makes the manufacturing line run, the quality system pass, and the box ship.

His training reads like a bridge between two coasts. A bachelor's in mechanical engineering from Duke. A master's from Stanford. Engineering on both ends, which matters when your product is, at heart, a mechanical solution to a mechanical problem. Sleep apnea, stripped of its biology, is a structural failure: soft tissue at the base of the tongue and the hyoid collapses backward and blocks the airway. Martin's answer is not a drug or a nightly device. It is a fastener.

That framing - airway obstruction as an engineering defect with an engineering fix - runs through everything Siesta builds. The company's first cleared product, the Encore System, was an integrated suite of instruments and implants designed to streamline hyoid and tongue suspension. Then came the Revolution Suture Passer, a tool that made the surgical steps faster and more repeatable. The point of both was the same: take a procedure that surgeons found fiddly and make it routine.

Routine is the unglamorous word that wins markets. Obstructive sleep apnea affects an enormous population, and the default treatment - CPAP, the mask-and-machine setup that pushes pressurized air through the night - works well for people who can tolerate it. Plenty cannot. They abandon the mask in a drawer. For years, those patients had limited surgical options, and the ones that existed carried a reputation for being invasive and inconsistent.

Martin's bet was that a minimally invasive, adjustable, reversible procedure could fill that gap. "AIRLIFT offers a unique alternative for patients who failed CPAP, have epiglottic collapse or do not qualify for hypoglossal nerve stimulation, or who simply are looking for an OSA treatment option whose treatment action doesn't require any additional patient action," he said in 2025. Read past the clinical phrasing and the proposition is human: for the people the machine left behind, here is a door.

The clearances came in a patient march rather than a single leap. The Encore System earned its FDA 510(k) clearance in 2011. A CE Mark and a U.S. clinical study followed in 2012. In 2014, the Encore System was cleared specifically for hyoid suspension - a milestone Martin called out at the time. "We are very excited about the additional hyoid suspension clearance for the Encore System and believe that it will provide significant benefit to our patients and accelerate our penetration into the sleep surgery market," he said. An expanded clearance arrived in 2019. A multicenter study in 2021 widened the evidence base.

Then, in May 2025, the field caught up to him. The International Surgical Sleep Society published a position statement recognizing hyoid myotomy and suspension as effective and non-investigational for managing obstructive sleep apnea across mild, moderate, and severe cases when tongue base or hypopharyngeal obstruction is present. For a company that had been building around exactly that approach since 2009, the endorsement read less like news and more like vindication. Martin had been right for sixteen years; the establishment simply wrote it down.

What keeps the story interesting is the scale of the underdog. Siesta is not a unicorn. It is a lean shop in Los Gatos that has competed against device makers many times its size by being relentlessly specific. The keyword list the company chases - hyoid suspension, tongue base suspension, airway patency, reversible procedure, insurance reimbursement - is narrow on purpose. Martin is not trying to own sleep medicine. He is trying to own one mechanically sound corner of it, and to make that corner the obvious choice when the mask fails.

There is a quiet discipline in that. Most founders widen. Martin deepened. The products got simpler, not more elaborate. The procedure got shorter, not longer. The pitch got more concrete, not more visionary. In an industry that loves to promise the future, he kept promising something smaller and more useful: a good night's sleep that stays put.