intuitive-surgical
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Brian Miller
Brian Miller is the CEO of Sovato, the Santa Barbara company building the first platform to let health systems deploy and scale remote robotic surgery. An electrical engineer turned roboticist with a PhD from Northwestern in haptics, he spent his first job at Computer Motion writing software for the AESOP and ZEUS robots and watched the 2001 Operation Lindbergh, the first transatlantic remote surgery. Twenty-three years at Intuitive Surgical followed, where he rose from control-systems analyst to Chief Digital Officer and Head of Digital and AI Strategy. In April 2026 he returned to the frontier he started on, taking Sovato from early market development toward its first patient programs in 2027.
David Stoffel
David Stoffel is the Chief Business Officer of RapidAI, the clinical-AI company whose stroke-imaging algorithms helped rewrite the rules of how strokes get treated. A medical doctor who chose boardrooms over bedsides, he has spent more than two decades turning ambitious medical technologies into standards of care - from the da Vinci surgical robot at Intuitive Surgical to mobile cardiac telemetry at iRhythm and point-of-care EEG at Ceribell. At RapidAI he runs the commercial engine: marketing, clinical affairs, education, customer success, corporate development, and finance.
Maggie Nixon
Maggie Nixon is the CEO of Capstan Medical, a Santa Cruz medtech startup building a robotic platform and catheter-delivered implants for minimally invasive mitral and tricuspid heart valve replacement. A nationally ranked high-school shot put and discus thrower, she earned a Stanford athletic scholarship, designed her own biomechanical engineering major, and then spent more than two decades at Intuitive Surgical across instrument design, clinical development, quality and regulatory, and China operations and strategy. In 2022 she reunited with her first Intuitive boss, Dan Wallace, to lead Capstan, where in 2025 her team completed the world's first robotic catheter mitral valve replacements in humans after raising a $110M Series C.