Accuray Brand Guidelines: CyberKnife, TomoTherapy & a 2023 Move to Madison

A neurosurgeon, a robotic arm and a 1990 start.

Accuray grew out of an idea from John R. Adler, a neurosurgeon on the faculty of Stanford University. English Wikipedia says that in 1985 Adler worked alongside Lars Leksell at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, where Leksell had developed the Gamma Knife, and came back to Stanford wanting a system that could be guided by medical images rather than by a frame fixed to the skull, and that used a linear accelerator rather than cobalt sources. Working with Stanford engineers, he built a prototype and by 1987 was pitching it, as the CyberKnife, to venture investors.

After repeated rejections, Wikipedia says, Adler raised money from fellow neurosurgeons, friends and family and started Accuray in 1990; the company’s own Wikipedia entry gives 1990 as the founding year and says commercial operations began in 1992. Adler stayed on the Stanford faculty and served as chief medical officer. The early years were hard: the company ran out of money in 1994, and Adler took leave from Stanford to run it as chief executive from 1999 to 2002.

The machine itself had a longer road. Wikipedia’s CyberKnife article says development began in 1989, with Adler working with Peter and Russell Schonberg of Schonberg Radiation Corporation; the first system was installed at Stanford in 1991; the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cleared it for clinical investigation in 1994, then approved it for tumours in the head in 1999 and for tumours throughout the body in 2001. Accuray listed on the Nasdaq in February 2007 under the ticker ARAY, which the company still uses.

CyberKnife and the TomoTherapy line.

Accuray’s products sit in two families. The first is the CyberKnife, which Wikipedia describes as a small linear accelerator mounted on a robotic arm, paired with an image-guidance system that tracks the target and steers the arm. It is built for stereotactic radiosurgery and stereotactic body radiation therapy. Accuray has released a run of models since the first: Wikipedia lists the G3 of 2005, the G4 of 2007, the VSI of 2009, the M6 of 2012 and the S7 of 2020.

The second family came from Wisconsin. The tomotherapy technique, Wikipedia says, was developed in the early 1990s at the University of Wisconsin–Madison by Thomas Rockwell Mackie and Paul Reckwerdt: a radiation source turns around the patient on a ring, much like the X-ray source of a CT scanner, while the patient moves through the bore. The Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, in a profile dated December 2024, says Mackie’s team spun the technology off as TomoTherapy in 1997. Accuray bought TomoTherapy in 2011, as both Wikipedia and The Badger Herald report, and the line continues today as Radixact, which the WEDC profile calls the latest version of the machine.

The WEDC profile says Accuray’s primary manufacturing, research and distribution had been centred in Madison for more than a decade before 2024. Accuray now sells both families alongside its own software: the company lists Accuray Precision treatment planning and iDMS data management on its website, and it also offers a veterinary oncology line. In September 2026 the trade magazine ITN reported that Accuray and the Swedish planning-software maker RaySearch Laboratories had signed a definitive agreement on 11 September to expand their collaboration on online adaptive radiation therapy, starting with Radixact and later extending to CyberKnife. Under that agreement, ITN said, Accuray will buy RayStation licences, and the two companies will market and support the resulting solutions together.

How the category presents itself.

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.

From Sunnyvale to Madison.

For most of its history Accuray was a California company with its headquarters in Sunnyvale. That changed in 2023. The Badger Herald, the University of Wisconsin–Madison student newspaper, reported in September 2023, citing the Wisconsin State Journal, that the move of the headquarters to Madison, Wisconsin took effect on 31 July 2023, that head count did not change and that more than 300 employees by then worked in Wisconsin. The WEDC profile adds that the company opened a new global training centre, the Accuray Center for Education, in Madison the same year, and that Accuray is part of the Wisconsin Biohealth Tech Hub Consortium formed after Madison’s designation as a U.S. Regional Tech Hub in July 2024.

On where things are made, the company is specific. Its website gives its corporate headquarters as Madison, lists manufacturing facilities in Madison and in Chengdu, China, keeps regional offices in Sunnyvale, Morges in Switzerland, Tokyo, Shanghai and Hong Kong, and runs training facilities in Madison, Genolier in Switzerland, Tokyo and Tianjin. Accuray says it has more than 850 employees. Wikipedia notes a joint venture in China, CNNC Accuray in Tianjin, which received its operating licence in July 2019. The WEDC profile says more than 1,000 Radixact, CyberKnife and earlier TomoTherapy machines are in use in the United States and more than 60 other countries.

The founder’s story continued elsewhere. Wikipedia says Adler has led ZAP Surgical as founder and chief executive since 2015, and that in 2025 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

The company’s public voice is plain and technical. Its website speaks of expanding “the powerful potential of radiation therapy” and lists five short values that all begin with “Be”: focused, collaborative, imaginative, passionate and exceptional. Product names carry registered marks, and the site ends with a long statement on the side effects of radiotherapy. For a design guide, Accuray shows how a maker of large clinical machines speaks through product families with memorable names, a university origin story told twice over and a home town that changed. Compare Varian, another radiotherapy maker, and ZAP Surgical. For this guide we use a steel blue, ink and white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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