The Memo: Resonant Link Medical Is Expanding What’s Possible for Implantable Devices

Under the direction of CEO Omari Bouknight, Resonant Link Medical is developing wireless power and data technologies designed to enable the next generation of smaller, smarter, and longer-lasting implantable medical devices. Through its Aurion WPT™ platform and Vivigo™, Eterni™, and Cardessa™ product platforms, the company works with medical device developers across applications ranging from miniature sensors and neurostimulators to high-power implants. By addressing power and communication as fundamental parts of implant design, Resonant Link Medical aims to give developers greater freedom in what they can build while reducing the burden of implanted technology on the people who rely on it.

Origin Story

Resonant Link Medical’s technology traces back to the Dartmouth laboratory of Charles “Charlie” Sullivan, PhD, a pioneer in power electronics and magnetics. Aaron Stein, PhD, now CTO of Resonant Link Medical, joined Sullivan’s lab as a postdoctoral fellow and helped turn a new approach to wireless power transfer into working technology. Along with their fellow founders, Stein and Sullivan established the original Resonant Link in 2017.

As the team explored applications across industries, medical devices emerged as an area where advances in power could have an especially meaningful impact. Jeff Chu, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Features Capital, later led the effort to establish Resonant Link Medical as a standalone company focused specifically on medical applications. Bouknight joined the effort to help complete the investor syndicate and Series A financing before becoming President and CEO in April 2025.

For Bouknight, however, the problem Resonant Link Medical is addressing was already familiar. Earlier in his career, his work with left ventricular assist devices (LVADs) exposed him to both the lifesaving potential of implantable technologies and the burdens their power requirements can place on patients.

“I became fascinated by wireless power transfer and the possibility of powering an implanted heart pump without a cable passing through the skin,” Bouknight says. “For patients, that could mean something profoundly personal: greater freedom in everyday life.”

The opportunity to join Resonant Link Medical allowed Bouknight to revisit that challenge on a much broader scale, including bringing lessons from cardiovascular device development into neurotechnology.

“What brought me to RLM was that combination: an exceptional technical team, an opportunity to contribute across cardiotech and neurotech, and a mission rooted in making life with an implant better,” he says.

The Current Landscape

Implantable technologies are being asked to do more. Developers want devices capable of sensing more information, processing it, communicating effectively, and operating for longer periods. At the same time, they are working to make those devices smaller and easier for patients to live with.

Those goals can conflict.

“The unmet need is the gap between what we want implantable technologies to do and what their power and data systems allow them to do,” Bouknight says.

Adding functionality can increase energy requirements, while reducing the size of an implant can leave less room for a battery. The resulting engineering tradeoffs can ultimately become patient burdens.

Implants with non-rechargeable batteries typically require additional procedures when their batteries are depleted. Many currently available rechargeable devices require patients to spend extended periods charging while maintaining careful alignment between the charger and implant. Heat generated during charging can create discomfort, while limited power-transfer range can constrain where and how deeply a device is implanted. At the highest end of the power spectrum, LVADs typically rely on a cable passing through the skin to connect the implanted device with an external power source.

“These approaches have enabled extraordinary medical technologies,” Bouknight says. “But they also ask patients to organize parts of their lives around keeping those technologies running.”

For developers, the same limitations can influence device size, placement, functionality, and the resources required to solve power and communication challenges. Resonant Link Medical is working to make those constraints less defining as implantable technologies become increasingly intelligent and connected.

Inside the Innovation

At its core, Resonant Link Medical’s technology transfers energy from outside the body to an implanted device without requiring a physical connection through the skin. An external transmitter generates an alternating magnetic field, and a receiver within the implant converts that energy into electrical power. Depending on the application, the power can recharge a battery or operate the implant directly.

The principle of wireless power is not new. Making it perform reliably within the constraints of an implanted medical device is the challenge.

“Our Aurion WPT technology combines patented innovations in coils, power electronics, magnetics, and data transfer into a coordinated system,” Bouknight explains. “Engineering those elements together allows us to achieve high performance across several dimensions: charging speed, implant depth, tolerance for movement, and management of heat.”

The company’s proprietary simulation tools allow its engineers to evaluate performance across different implant depths, positions, and power requirements before physical prototypes are built. That process can help development teams make design decisions earlier and tailor the power system to the needs of a specific device.

Resonant Link Medical has developed three product platforms spanning a range of implant requirements. Vivigo, Eterni, and Cardessa support applications ranging from miniature, low-power implants to systems with substantially greater energy demands, with rechargeable and battery-free configurations possible depending on the application.

Vivigo, for example, can recharge an implantable device’s battery in approximately 20 minutes, depending on the battery and system configuration. In appropriate configurations, Resonant Link Medical can also support implant depths of up to 6 cm.

The company is simultaneously advancing data-transfer capabilities. As implants become more capable of sensing, processing, and responding to information, Bouknight sees energy and communication as increasingly interconnected challenges.

“Ultimately, we want to change what developers consider possible,” he says. “When power becomes less of a constraint, it creates room for new capabilities, new applications, and a better experience for the person living with the implant.”

Progress and Milestones

Resonant Link Medical is now a revenue-generating company with established wireless power product platforms, active customer integration programs, and systems in use in IDE-approved human trials. Because the company provides enabling technology for other manufacturers’ devices, its work spans programs at different stages, from early feasibility and product development through clinical evaluation and progress toward commercialization.

The company took a major step forward in 2025 when Resonant Link Medical was established as an independent company and completed an oversubscribed Series A financing.

That same year, the company worked with 25 medical device manufacturers across cardiac rhythm management, circulatory support, neuromodulation, brain-computer interfaces, sensing and diagnostics, hearing, sleep apnea, smart orthopedics, and urinary and gastrointestinal applications.

“That breadth underscores how widely the need for better implantable power extends across medicine, and how one enabling technology can support innovation in many different areas of patient care,” Bouknight says.

More recently, Resonant Link Medical announced the launch of its next-generation Vivigo platform, built on Aurion WPT, expanding the tools available to developers of rechargeable and battery-free implants.

The company is now focused on scaling its technology and making integration increasingly repeatable while continuing to expand its power and data capabilities. More standardized interfaces, stronger simulation tools, and reusable verification and validation resources are intended to help customers make critical decisions earlier in development and move forward with greater confidence.

For Bouknight, the longer-term objective is expansive: to make Resonant Link Medical the foundation upon which developers build the next generation of implantable technologies.

“Ultimately, our ambition is to become the de facto standard for power and data in implantable medical devices: a trusted foundation that developers can build upon with confidence,” he says. “That gives them more freedom to pursue ambitious ideas and brings us closer to our mission: enabling smaller, smarter, and longer-lasting implantables that help people get well and stay well.”

Join Us at LSI USA ‘27

Bouknight 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 Resonant Link Medical’s technology and development.