Tarek Makansi is no stranger to solving big problems with elegant engineering. With a BS from Cornell and a PhD from UC Berkeley in electrical engineering, he began his career in data storage at IBM, where he rose to executive leadership and eventually served as CTO for IBM’s Venture Capital Group. “I was scouting the world for startup companies for IBM to acquire,” he said. “Then I left after 20 years and started Tempronics, which was sold to a Fortune 500 company.” In 2017, after observing the bulky nature of neuromodulation systems, which typically involve large pacemaker-like implants wired to peripheral nerves, Makansi saw an opportunity to rethink the model entirely. “I noticed that for neuromodulation, people were using a large implant in the chest or the back and running a wire to the nerve,” he explained. “As a professional electrical engineer, I became curious. How much electricity was really needed at the nerve? It turned out that it was a very small amount. So I thought: there must be a way to miniaturize this.”