The Billion-Dollar Bet Medtech is Taking

Early 2025, At the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, Medtronic CEO Geoff Martha spotlighted a wave of breakthroughs in atrial fibrillation, hypertension, diabetes, and neurological diseases; markets on the cusp of explosive growth. Among them, one technology has seized unprecedented investor attention: renal denervation (RDN).

Once a fringe experiment, RDN has become one of cardiovascular medtech’s fastest-rising stars a sub-30-minute procedure that tackles one of medicine’s toughest chronic conditions by “burning” renal nerves. After tough clinical trials, it has leapt from concept to billion-dollar race, attracting capital at a pace rarely seen in this sector.

Who's Backing Renal Denervation?

Renal denervation has shifted from being an experimental niche to one of the most aggressively funded spaces in cardiovascular medtech. Between 2023 and 2025 alone, more than $826 million in disclosed capital has poured into the field through acquisitions and venture financing.

After clinical trials that lasted over a decade led by Medtronic just to prove the tech works, Boston Scientific made the single largest move in the sector with its $540 million acquisition of SoniVie and its ultrasound-based TIVUS system. The deal cemented ultrasound as a core technology platform and signaled to the market that RDN is now a commercial race.

Ablative Solutions secured over $91 million in Series D funding to push its alcohol-mediated Peregrine system through pivotal trials, while Pulnovo Medical closed a $100 million Series C for pulmonary and renal denervation technologies in the Asia-Pacific market. European players like Gradient Denervation Technologies and SoniVie attracted significant capital from healthcare-focused VCs such as Andera Partners, Gilde Healthcare, and Sofinnova Partners, while Chinese firms like Brattea pulled in more than $20 million from regional private equity.

The pattern is clear: the world’s biggest medtech companies and top-tier investors are betting heavily on one thing; the autonomic nervous system as a new therapeutic frontier. With FDA approvals in 2023 and CMS reimbursement discussions underway, the RDN market has matured into a billion-dollar category.

Why you shouldn't back it

Do not take this as criticism of life-saving technologies. But here is the reality most investors never hear: nearly every dollar going into renal denervation is chasing a technology built on destruction. These systems burn, cut, or chemically ablate nerves under the assumption that removing part of the system fixes the problem. Yet the human body is not static. It is a reactive, adaptive network. Destroying a component is the opposite of working with it. More details here.

Medicine has faced this before. Centuries ago, the physician Ibn Sina, whose Canon of Medicine shaped practice for hundreds of years, described cauterization as an early form of ablation. Even then, he warned it should only be used as a last resort because of the irreversible damage it caused. His insight was simple: when you destroy, you pay a price.

Modern medicine has followed the same pattern. Ablation was once the standard approach: cut it out, burn it away, silence the signal. Progress always moves in one direction, from destruction to control. Neurology is the clearest proof. We once treated movement disorders by ablating brain regions. Then deep brain stimulation arrived, and by modulating intact circuits instead of destroying them, outcomes improved and the therapy became scalable.

Renal denervation today is where neurology was before deep brain stimulation. The real opportunity is not in silencing nerves but in learning to communicate with them, to modulate their behavior without burning the hardware they run on.

Investing in ablation is like fixing a stuck piano key by ripping it out. The bad note is gone, but so is every future melody it could have played. Neurovia is building the equivalent of tuning the instrument instead, keeping every key intact while restoring harmony to the system.

This is what turns a one-shot procedure into a platform technology. Neurovia’s implants do not destroy. They interface. They modulate. They sense and adapt. The same physiological networks Boston Scientific and Medtronic are spending hundreds of millions to silence are the ones we are learning to communicate with, and that is a far larger market.

For investors, this is the inflection point. The capital flooding renal denervation validates the market and de-risks the space. But the next decade will not belong to ablation. It will belong to intelligent, reversible, adaptive implants that can scale far beyond hypertension into heart failure, orthostatic hypotension, and multi-organ control. That is the category Neurovia is defining.

When everyone else is spending hundreds of millions to chase the old model, the smarter play is to own the future one.