The Memo: Chipiron Is Rebuilding MRI From First Principles

Under the direction of Co-Founder & CEO Evan Kervella, Chipiron is developing an ultra-low-field MRI system designed to make breast MRI more accessible and affordable. Rather than attempting to shrink the architecture of a conventional scanner, the Paris-based company is rethinking how MRI is built, using a lower magnetic field alongside innovations in signal detection, noise cancellation, and image reconstruction. Its first product is a dedicated, seated breast MRI system with integrated biopsy capability, targeting a gap between the clinical value of supplemental breast MRI and the limited capacity of conventional systems to deliver it at scale.

Origin Story

Chipiron was founded in 2021 by Kervella and CSO Dimitri Labat, two physicists who saw an opportunity to reconsider one of medical imaging’s most established architectures. Labat completed his PhD in condensed matter theory and previously worked on superconducting sensors.

“The company comes from a physics observation,” Kervella said. “MRI is the best soft-tissue imaging modality medicine has, and its architecture has barely moved in 40 years: a superconducting magnet weighing several tons, helium cooling, a shielded room, a price tag of one to three million dollars, and a building designed around the machine.”

Chipiron’s founding thesis was that those constraints were not inherent to MRI itself. Instead of relying on an enormous magnet to generate a stronger signal, Kervella and Labat believed improvements in detection could allow MRI to operate at substantially lower magnetic field strengths.

“The magnet is huge because detection is poor,” Kervella said. “Fix detection, and you can image at a field fifty to a hundred times lower than a hospital scanner, with a machine that fits in a normal room. That is the bet we made: rebuild MRI from first principles instead of shrinking the existing one.”

Early feedback from radiologists helped turn that physics proposition into a company. Chipiron’s €1 million pre-seed round was funded primarily by radiologists, according to Kervella, and the company received €45 million in letters of intent before the machine existed.

“Physicists are used to hearing that their ideas are interesting,” Kervella said. “Hearing ‘take my money’ is a different signal, and we took it seriously.”

Today, Chipiron is based in Paris with a team of 30, including 14 PhDs. Despite its European base, the company plans to enter the U.S. first, with FDA 510(k) clearance as its initial regulatory target.

The Current Landscape

Chipiron is initially focusing on supplemental breast screening, where the company sees a mismatch between the capabilities of MRI and access to the modality.

For women with dense breasts, mammography can be less sensitive because both dense breast tissue and tumors appear white on an image. Breast density is also an independent risk factor for breast cancer. Roughly 40% of women of screening age have dense breast tissue.

MRI can provide another layer of screening. Kervella pointed to the Dutch DENSE trial, in which supplemental MRI for women with extremely dense breasts detected approximately 16 additional cancers per 1,000 screens and halved the interval cancer rate.

The challenge is capacity.

“Conventional MRI slots are consumed by neuro, spine, and musculoskeletal imaging; a breast MRI requires a 30 to 45 minute prone examination in a narrow bore, a contrast injection, a shielded room, and a scanner that costs millions,” Kervella said. “The science is settled. The bottleneck is the machine.”

Current supplemental options for women with dense breasts include whole-breast ultrasound, contrast-enhanced mammography, and MRI. Each carries its own trade-offs, while access to breast MRI remains constrained by the cost and availability of conventional systems.

There is another challenge when MRI detects a lesion that cannot be seen using other modalities. The subsequent biopsy must also be performed under MRI guidance. According to Kervella, relatively few centers offer MRI-guided biopsy, creating another potential delay in the patient pathway.

For Chipiron, those constraints create an opportunity to rethink the machine around breast imaging rather than asking breast imaging to compete for capacity on a multipurpose scanner.

Inside the Innovation

Chipiron’s first product is a dedicated breast MRI system operating at approximately 20 millitesla, compared with 1.5 to 3 tesla for conventional MRI scanners. The system is designed to occupy approximately two square meters, run on standard radiology-room power, and operate without a superconducting magnet, helium cooling, or a shielded room.

“We have not made a smaller version of a conventional scanner,” Kervella said. “We have reinvented MRI around the breast.”

Patients are seated in an open configuration with the breast positioned inside the imaging coil, eliminating the prone position and enclosed bore associated with conventional breast MRI. Chipiron is targeting a 25-minute examination using the T1 pre-contrast, T2, and T1 post-contrast series already familiar to radiologists.

The open geometry is also designed to support integrated MRI-guided biopsy, allowing an MRI-detected lesion to be accessed without referring the patient to another system or center.

Making ultra-low-field MRI work, however, requires addressing a fundamental challenge: MRI signal scales with field strength. Chipiron’s approach is to recover performance through the detection side rather than the magnet side.

Its receive chain is cooled to 70 kelvin using liquid nitrogen to remove most of the thermal noise from the electronics. The system also measures and actively cancels ambient electromagnetic noise, eliminating the need for a conventional Faraday cage. Chipiron’s magnet architecture is designed to provide the field homogeneity needed for efficient imaging sequences, while a reconstruction engine trained on the company’s own data combines convolutional and transformer architectures to turn raw acquisitions into diagnostic images.

The company’s product target is 2 by 2 by 4 millimeter voxel resolution across T1, T2, and post-contrast series within a 25-minute examination.

Chipiron is also targeting a system price approximately three times lower than that of a 1.5 tesla scanner. Kervella expects total cost of ownership to benefit further from eliminating infrastructure requirements including a shielded room, helium, and a dedicated building.

Progress and Milestones

Chipiron remains preclinical but is preparing to make the transition into clinical development. The company has built five generations of prototypes in-house, obtained its first in vivo images, established four patent families, and raised $25 million to date.

Its first clinical device is now in production and is expected to be installed at a French cancer center for the company’s first clinical investigation in 2027. The study is intended to establish image quality against conventional breast MRI in patients.

“First patient images in 2027, then a head-to-head comparison against high-field breast MRI, then the multi-center trial supporting FDA clearance, which we target around 2030,” Kervella said.

Electrical safety testing of the clinical device is expected to conclude in early 2027, followed by an ethics submission for the first clinical investigation. Chipiron is also preparing to open a financing round of approximately €10 million in early 2027 to carry the company through its first clinical readouts and position it for a subsequent Series B.

Breast imaging is intended to be the starting point for a broader MRI platform. Chipiron sees potential future applications in prostate, cardiac, and musculoskeletal imaging, areas where the company believes MRI utilization is similarly constrained by cost and access.

“Breast is the wedge, not the ceiling,” Kervella said.

Further ahead, the company’s ambitions extend to a more fundamental question about the role MRI could play in screening if its economics change.

“Once the cost of goods comes down, an MRI at the price of a mammography unit changes what first-line screening looks like,” Kervella said. “That is the ambition, stated with the humility of a company that has not yet cleared its first device.”

Join Us at LSI USA ‘27

Kervella has been selected to present at LSI USA ’27, March 15th–19th, in front of hundreds of global medical technology companies. Join us in welcoming him to the event in Dana Point, CA, where he will share the latest updates on Chipiron’s technology and development.