ZAP Surgical Brand Guidelines: The CyberKnife Inventor’s San Carlos Gyroscopic ZAP-X

The CyberKnife inventor starts again.

ZAP Surgical Systems is a radiosurgery company based in San Carlos, California, on the San Francisco Peninsula. It says it was founded in 2014 by John R. Adler, the Stanford neurosurgeon who invented the CyberKnife; English Wikipedia says he has served as its founder and chief executive since 2015. The company’s leadership page still lists him in both roles, and The Robot Report quoted him as founder and CEO in November 2024.

Adler’s path to ZAP runs through the history of the field. English Wikipedia says he joined the Stanford faculty in 1987, after a radiosurgery fellowship at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, where he worked alongside Lars Leksell, the inventor of the Gamma Knife. Back at Stanford he worked with engineers on a prototype frameless system guided by medical imaging, which became the CyberKnife, and in 1990 he started Accuray to build it; English Wikipedia’s Accuray article gives 1990 as the founding year and 1992 as the start of commercial operations.

Other roles followed. In 2009 Adler founded the online medical journal Cureus, which Springer Nature acquired in 2022, and in 2010 he became a vice president at Varian Medical Systems, English Wikipedia says. It also records that he received the Cushing Award for Technical Excellence and Innovation in Neurosurgery in 2018 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2025.

ZAP, then, is a second radiosurgery company from the same inventor. Its about page sets out the aim in its own words: to “make world-class SRS accessible to the millions who currently lack access”. It estimates that some five million people a year are candidates for stereotactic radiosurgery and that about 200,000 receive it; those are the company’s figures.

Gyroscopic Radiosurgery.

The company makes one platform, the ZAP-X, sold under its trademark Gyroscopic Radiosurgery. It is a dedicated system for the brain, head and neck rather than a general-purpose treatment machine. A physics paper in Cureus in 2019 described the ZAP-X, made by ZAP Surgical Systems of San Carlos, as a new, dedicated, self-contained and self-shielded radiosurgery system, and measured it as a 3-megavolt linear accelerator with a 2-millimetre focal spot and a dose rate of 1,500 monitor units a minute at the isocentre.

The company describes the mechanism as dual independent gantries that move the beam around a spherical workspace, so that radiation can be aimed from thousands of angles. It contrasts the design with older radiosurgery systems in two ways. First, the ZAP-X uses a linear accelerator rather than radioactive cobalt-60 sources, which the Gamma Knife uses, so there are no sources to secure and replace. Second, it calls the system vault-free, meaning it is designed to work without a separately shielded treatment room, while noting that shielding requirements vary by country. The Robot Report repeated both points as the company’s description in November 2024.

The milestones are given on the company’s product page: FDA 510(k) clearance in 2017, the first patient treatments in 2019 and CE clearance in 2021. In August 2025 the company announced that its 5,000th patient had been treated, at Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune, New Jersey,.

The company’s recent announcements chart where the ZAP-X is going. In September 2026 it announced a first installation in Australia, with GenesisCare at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, and a debut in Thailand; in October 2026 it announced a radiosurgery programme at Fukuoka Kieikai Hospital in Japan, describing a glass-walled installation.

Design and documentation.

Radiotherapy companies sell machines that most people never see. A linear accelerator sits in a shielded treatment room, often called a bunker, and is bought by hospital physicists, radiation oncologists and administrators rather than by the public. Their brand material is therefore built for a professional audience first, and the patient appears mostly through the treatment room and the people who work in it.

The dominant image is the machine itself: a large, rounded white gantry around a treatment couch, photographed in a calm room with soft lighting and, often, a coloured wall or ceiling panel. Close-ups of the gantry head, the couch and the imaging arms stand in for the engineering inside. The palette that follows is clinical: white and pale grey for the hardware, with one or two blues, teals or purples carried through the logo, the interface and the trade-show stand.

Software has become the second subject. Treatment-planning screens show a scan of the body with the planned dose laid over it as a colour wash, usually running from cool blues at the edges to warm reds and yellows at the centre, and those images are used in brochures as freely as the machines. Physicists and radiation therapists at a console, checking a plan or a quality-assurance result, supply the human scene.

Much of the industry’s visual calendar is set by congresses. The annual meeting of ASTRO, the American Society for Radiation Oncology, and the ESTRO congress in Europe are where companies launch systems, build their stands and publish the photographs and films that then circulate for the year. For a designer, the category is a study in presenting heavy, regulated equipment in a quiet, exact register.

A venture-backed company with Asian partners.

ZAP Surgical is a private, venture-backed company. In November 2024 The Robot Report reported that it had closed a Series E funding round led by Qingdao Baheal Medical, a Chinese healthcare company, with other strategic investors taking part, and that the money would go towards commercialising the ZAP-X. Baheal’s chairman, Fu Gang, was quoted welcoming the partnership. The company’s leadership page lists a president of ZAP Surgical China and a president of ZAP Surgical Japan, alongside its executives in San Carlos, and the company also runs a Chinese-language website.

The way it talks about itself is consistent: one product, a founder who invented an earlier radiosurgery system, and a message centred on access. Its about page lists values including “Respect for All”, being “Patient-Focused” and a “Startup Mindset”, and its home page carries the line “That was then. This is next.” Its press releases describe it as a company working in “non-invasive robotic brain surgery”. Those are the company’s own words.

The name is short and set in capitals. The product name follows it, with ZAP-X for the treatment system, and the company’s press releases carry the registered sign on both ZAP-X and Gyroscopic Radiosurgery, the phrase it uses for the whole method.

For a design guide, ZAP Surgical shows how a one-product company can build a brand around a single mechanism and the record of its founder. Compare Accuray, the company Adler started to build the CyberKnife, and Elekta, the Swedish maker of the cobalt-based Gamma Knife. For this guide we use a deep teal and a signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep ZAP Surgical’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.