Precision Neuroscience appoints Nevro founder Alataris as president
Precision Neuroscience has appointed Konstantinos Alataris, founder and former chief executive of spinal cord stimulation company Nevro, as president, and Katherine Neuenfeldt, who led Nevro's US commercial launch, as senior vice president of commercial strategies. Both executives arrive with specific expertise in taking implantable neural devices through regulatory clearance, payer negotiations, and market adoption, capabilities the New York-based brain-computer interface (BCI) company now regards as its most pressing operational priority.
The appointments follow a $250 million Series D financing round that lifted Precision's total capital raised to $430 million since its founding in 2021. The company said the fresh capital, combined with the two hires, marks the start of a commercialisation push for its Layer 7 cortical surface array, which received FDA clearance and is positioned by the company as the only minimally invasive, safely removable, high-bandwidth BCI currently in clinical use.
From the boardroom to operations
Alataris has sat on Precision's board since May 2025 and will continue as a director alongside his executive responsibilities. At Nevro, which he founded in 2006, he oversaw a development arc that included European CE marking in 2010, a New York Stock Exchange IPO in 2014, and FDA approval for the Senza high-frequency spinal cord stimulation system in 2015, by which point the company had reached a multi-billion dollar market capitalisation. He subsequently served as president and chief executive of Zosano Pharma and co-founded Nesos, a neuromodulation startup.
Chief executive Michael Mager framed the hires explicitly around market access rather than technology development. "Bringing a new Class III medical device to market takes more than technical skill and capital," he said. "Konstantinos and Katherine have done exactly that with implantable devices in the nervous system."
Neuenfeldt joined Nevro as an early employee and led the 2015 US launch of the company's HF10 therapy before moving into a vice president of market access role, where she built a 40-person team spanning pricing, contracting, patient access, and reimbursement. She has also held launch roles at Medtronic Cardiovascular and, most recently, served as senior vice president of commercial strategies at Presidio Medical.
Reimbursement as the critical bottleneck
Neuenfeldt identified payer coverage as the single largest barrier to broad BCI adoption, noting that a device approved by regulators and desired by clinicians can still fail to reach patients if insurers decline to reimburse it. Precision has said it is targeting conditions including ALS, spinal cord injury, and brainstem stroke, areas where health-economic arguments for BCI coverage remain nascent and contested.
The broader BCI market is entering what many analysts regard as a pivotal commercialisation window. Synchron, which also uses a minimally invasive approach via the jugular vein, and Neuralink, which relies on a penetrating electrode array, are the principal competitors by clinical profile. Precision differentiates itself on the removability of its cortical surface array and the breadth of its clinical footprint: the company reports more than 100 patient procedures across 18 institutions, with high-resolution recording across 4,096 electrodes. A commercial partnership with Medtronic and a wholly owned MEMS manufacturing facility in Texas further distinguish its infrastructure from earlier-stage peers.
Reimbursement precedent for neural devices suggests the path will be lengthy. Vagus nerve stimulators, deep brain stimulators, and cochlear implants each required multi-year evidence-generation campaigns before achieving broad coverage. Precision's decision to hire executives who navigated precisely that process at Nevro signals the company is calibrating its timeline accordingly.