Nevro Corp

Nevro was set up in Redwood City in 2006 to answer a specific clinical question that the previous three decades of spinal-cord-stimulation research had not resolved: whether stimulation at frequencies an order of magnitude above the industry-standard 40–60 Hz could relieve chronic back and leg pain without the tingling, buzzing paresthesia that patients on the older technology were required to live with. The company’s answer, developed through the Senza system and a decade of pivotal clinical trials, was ten kilohertz — a stimulation frequency two hundred times above the legacy standard and, on the trial evidence, the first stimulation therapy to demonstrate superiority to the legacy approach for back and leg pain in a head-to-head comparative pivotal study. Twenty years on, HF10 has been implanted in more than 115,000 patients worldwide, and Nevro operates as a publicly traded medical-device firm listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

The firm designs, manufactures, and supports the Senza family of implantable spinal-cord stimulators — the implantable pulse generator, the leads placed against the dura, the external patient controller, and the clinician programming system — plus the clinical-education and support apparatus a hospital and its pain-management specialists need to run the therapy on a patient. Principal indications now include chronic intractable pain of the back and legs, painful diabetic neuropathy (an FDA approval received in 2021 that opened a substantially larger addressable patient population), and non-surgical back pain. Manufacturing and clinical operations run from the Redwood City campus.

Nevro’s distinguishing position among neuromodulation firms is that the company is defined by a single categorical bet: the 10 kHz stimulation frequency is not one product line among several — it is the entire commercial identity of the firm. That single-thesis discipline gave Nevro the head-to-head pivotal-trial evidence base that the legacy competitors (all of them larger, all of them running multi-therapy portfolios) had never assembled, and it is the same discipline that has since underwritten the firm’s expansion into new indications: painful diabetic neuropathy, non-surgical back pain, and the successive extensions of the same underlying stimulation platform into additional chronic-pain conditions.