Brainlab Brand Guidelines: Vilsmeier’s 1989 Munich Software Firm, Novalis & ExacTrac

Software first, written in a family home.

Brainlab is a Munich medical-technology company founded in 1989 by Stefan Vilsmeier. English and German Wikipedia both give that year and city, and the company’s own history page says Vilsmeier started the business in his parents’ house, paying for it with earnings from a book he had written on 3D graphics. German Wikipedia, citing the Münchner Merkur in 2009, adds that he wrote the book as a teenager.

The first product was software, not a machine. English Wikipedia describes a mouse-controlled, menu-driven program for planning and navigating surgery, introduced at the University of Vienna in 1990 and shown at the annual meeting of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons in Washington, D.C., in 1992. German Wikipedia, citing the BBC in 2003, says Vilsmeier later described that show as the product’s breakthrough, and records the first sales, to South Africa, North America and Taiwan, in 1993.

The company moved several times as it grew. By its own account its first official headquarters, from 1993, was a flat in Poing, east of Munich; English Wikipedia dates the Poing move to 1991. Wikipedia then lists Heimstetten from 1995 and a purpose-built head office in Feldkirchen from 2006, opened by the Bavarian minister-president Edmund Stoiber.

At the end of 2016 Brainlab moved again, to a new headquarters in Munich-Riem, on the grounds of the city’s former airport and beside its listed old control tower. German Wikipedia names the architects as Kadawittfeldarchitektur and says the building was formally opened on 11 July 2017, with Chancellor Angela Merkel and the Bavarian economy minister Ilse Aigner as guests.

Radiosurgery and the operating room.

Radiosurgery arrived early. In 1993, English Wikipedia says, Brainlab developed a system for stereotactic radiosurgery built around a linear accelerator and fitted with micro-multileaf collimators, the small movable leaves that shape a radiation beam. In 1996 it began a long partnership in radiosurgery with the Californian company Varian. In 1997 it introduced Novalis, its first shaped-beam radiosurgery system, and in 2007 the partners launched Novalis Tx, developed jointly, according to both Wikipedias.

Surgery is the other half of the business. Also in 1997 Brainlab moved into image-guided surgery, and English Wikipedia credits it with being the first to develop passive marker technology, in which a camera follows reflective markers on instruments. In 2007 it launched an intraoperative CT scanner on rails with Siemens Medical Solutions, now part of Siemens Healthineers. The Digital Lightbox of 2008, used to view and adjust patient images in the operating room, became Buzz Digital O.R. in 2012. English Wikipedia names the Kick navigation system, the Curve technology and the Airo mobile intraoperative CT among Brainlab products that won Red Dot design awards.

On the radiotherapy side, much of what Brainlab sells is software. The Elements applications, which the company dates to 2013, cover planning tasks such as cranial and spine radiosurgery and the planning of several brain metastases in one session, English Wikipedia says. ExacTrac Dynamic handles patient positioning and monitoring during image-guided treatment. In September 2022 Vilsmeier, a Brainlab research leader and a Hamburg clinician were named among the three finalists for the Deutscher Zukunftspreis, the German Federal President’s award for technology and innovation, for the ExacTrac Dynamic work.

Surgery products listed by English Wikipedia include the Curve and Kick navigation systems, the Loop-X mobile imaging robot and the Cirq robotic platform. The company says a 2018 development partnership with Magic Leap brought mixed reality into its surgical work, and English Wikipedia records a 2025 FDA 510(k) clearance for Spine Mixed Reality Navigation, which shows information in a headset worn by the surgeon.

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 private company, and a listing postponed.

Brainlab has stayed privately held. In June 2025 InvestmentWeek reported that Vilsmeier held about half of the shares and the investor EMH Partners about 35 per cent. That month the company completed its conversion from an AG into a European company (SE), registered on 24 June 2025, it announced, with a single administrative board as its governing body. English Wikipedia says Vilsmeier moved to chair that board in 2025 after some 35 years at the head of the company, with Rainer Birkenbach as chief executive. Also in June 2025 Brainlab announced the spin-off of Snke Holding SE, grouping the Snke OS platform with the former Level Ex, Mint Medical and VisionTree businesses; Vilsmeier became its chief executive.

A stock-market listing has been discussed for decades. German Wikipedia records a planned flotation that was called off in 2001. A second attempt came in 2025: trading in Brainlab SE shares on the Prime Standard of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange was due to begin on 3 July 2025, but on 1 July the company and its selling shareholders postponed the IPO, saying in an ad hoc notice that a later listing remained under consideration. The broadcaster ZDF reported on 6 July 2025 that the shares would have opened at the lower end of the price range, and that the company pointed to a market environment that was not optimal.

Acquisitions have widened the group. Brainlab bought Voyant Health of Israel in 2011, renaming it Brainlab Israel; the robotics developer Medineering in 2019; and in 2022 a majority of MedPhoton of Salzburg, which the company says develops and produces imaging systems for surgery and radiotherapy, as well as Dr. Langer Medical of Waldkirch, a neuromonitoring specialist. In 2019 it sold its orthopaedic joint-reconstruction business to Smith & Nephew. The company says its systems are installed in about 120 countries and that it has 25 locations beyond its Munich head office.

For a design guide, Brainlab shows a company that presents medical technology as software first, from its first planning program in 1990 to the Elements applications. Compare Varian, its long-time partner on Novalis, and Siemens Healthineers, its partner on the rail-mounted CT. For this guide we use a slate blue and a steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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