Butterfly Network Brand Guidelines: Ultrasound on a Chip, From Guilford to the NYSE

A Guilford start-up from the 4Catalyzer stable.

Butterfly Network was founded in 2011 by Jonathan Rothberg, English Wikipedia says, citing Forbes. Rothberg had earlier started the genomics company CuraGen and the DNA-sequencing firms 454 Life Sciences and Ion Torrent, Forbes reported in October 2017. Butterfly is one of the companies of 4Catalyzer, the start-up accelerator Rothberg set up in Guilford, Connecticut, in the early 2010s, according to Wikipedia. Forbes reported that he started Butterfly after hearing a talk by the MIT physicist Max Tegmark, and that Tegmark’s student Nevada Sanchez became a co-founder; the magazine had named Sanchez to its 30 Under 30 list in 2015. Most ultrasound scans, Forbes noted, were then done on machines large enough to be wheeled on a cart, with several attachments swapped according to the part of the body being examined.

The idea was to change what sits inside the probe. Conventional ultrasound machines, including those made by General Electric, Philips and Fujifilm, use piezoelectric crystals to send and receive sound waves; Butterfly replaced them with a silicon chip, Forbes reported, which made the device cheaper to manufacture and let a single sensor stand in for the several probes a traditional machine uses. The company calls the approach Ultrasound-on-Chip. In 2020 it said the chip in its second probe was made in partnership with the Taiwanese foundry TSMC, using MEMS manufacturing integrated with CMOS technology.

The first product, the Butterfly iQ, was announced in October 2017. Forbes described it then as a 300-gram hand-held device with no attachments to swap, which connected to an iPhone, and reported that Butterfly was launching it with 13 different device clearances from the US Food and Drug Administration. The magazine noted that the device was not intended for consumers, at least at first, and that the artificial intelligence packaged with it was meant, over time, to help less experienced medical professionals take and read ultrasound images. Rothberg called it “the birth of an industry.” Butterfly’s own company description dates the launch of what it presents as a pioneering handheld, single-probe, whole-body ultrasound system to 2018.

iQ, iQ+ and iQ3, and the software around them.

Two further generations followed. On 7 October 2020, in a release datelined Guilford, Butterfly announced the Butterfly iQ+, which it said had a faster chip, longer battery life, a Needle Viz feature to help users see a needle during guided procedures, and a body of anodised aluminium. The company says the iQ3 followed in 2024, and that it was named Best Medical Technology at the 2024 Prix Galien USA awards; it also lists recognition from the Fierce 50, TIME’s Best Inventions and Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas.

Around the probes Butterfly has built software. The probes work with a mobile app on supported iOS and Android phones and tablets, and the company sells Compass AI, an enterprise workflow product, alongside Butterfly Garden, a software development kit and marketplace for third-party imaging apps, it says. Its range also includes the iQ+ Bladder, a bladder scanner, and education packages for medical schools and residency programmes. Its stated mission is “to democratize healthcare by making medical imaging accessible to everyone around the world,” and it runs a Global Health programme that offers discounted devices, software and training to clinicians working in limited-resource settings.

The chip has also become a product in itself. The company describes Butterfly Embedded as its Ultrasound-on-Chip licensing and co-development business. On the eve of its first brain-computer-interface summit, held on 2 September 2026, it announced a multi-year licensing agreement giving Merge Labs, a brain-computer-interface start-up, access to its Poseidon family of chips, with Butterfly as Merge’s exclusive CMOS-MEMS chip-based ultrasound partner.

How imaging makers present themselves.

Ultrasound and medical imaging makers sell to a small, expert audience, and their brands are built to be read in clinical rooms rather than shop windows. A typical ultrasound system is a grey and white console on wheels, parked beside a hospital bed, with a touch panel, a keyboard of controls and a row of probes hanging from its side. The maker’s name usually sits small on the front or the monitor frame; the shape, the colour of the plastics and the layout of the controls do much of the brand’s work.

The screen matters as much as the shell. Scan screens are typically dark and blue-grey, with the greyscale image at the centre, and makers give their measurement tools, presets and assistant features their own product names. Newer handheld scanners shrink the console to a single probe that connects to a phone or tablet, so the app becomes the visible face of the brand.

Larger imaging equipment, such as X-ray, CT, MRI and mammography systems, lives in radiology suites, where the machine is often a white ring or open frame in a quiet room. Here the brand appears on the gantry, in the room’s lighting and on the operator console next door. Several makers in this guide build dedicated or open MRI and digital radiography alongside ultrasound.

Much of this branding is shown first at trade fairs. The annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in Chicago and the European Congress of Radiology (ECR) are where makers launch systems, stage booths and present new software, and both Samsung and Esaote have used them for product introductions. Ownership also changes often in this field: brands pass between state groups, investors and larger industrial companies while keeping their names.

From Guilford to the New York Stock Exchange.

Butterfly went public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company. On 16 February 2021 it announced that it had completed its business combination with Longview Acquisition Corp., a SPAC sponsored by an affiliate of Glenview Capital Management, after Longview’s stockholders approved the deal on 12 February. The combined company took the name Butterfly Network, Inc., and its Class A shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange that day under the symbol BFLY. Rothberg became chairman of the board and Todd Fruchterman president and chief executive. That release was datelined Guilford and New York.

Leadership changed several times on the way. The iQ+ was launched under chief executive Laurent Faracci in 2020, and the 2021 listing release described Butterfly as a digital health company working to “democratize medical imaging.” The company has since moved its base. Its 2026 press releases are datelined Burlington, Massachusetts, and name Joseph DeVivo as president, chief executive and chairman. Butterfly says its devices are available to trained healthcare practitioners in parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East and North and South America, and in 2026 it announced that the iQ+ and iQ3 were on sale in Brazil through authorised distribution partners.

For a design guide, Butterfly Network shows a medical imaging brand built around one probe, a phone and an app rather than a cart-mounted console. Compare FUJIFILM Sonosite, an earlier pioneer of portable ultrasound, and Clarius, another maker of handheld ultrasound. For this guide we use a navy, a mid blue and a silver-grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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