Clarius Brand Guidelines: Wireless Handheld Ultrasound From Ultrasonix’s Founder

A second Vancouver ultrasound company from the same founder.

Clarius Mobile Health is a Vancouver company, and it is the second ultrasound business its founder has started in the city. Export Development Canada, the Canadian government’s export credit agency, wrote in October 2024 that the company has been headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, since its inception in 2014. Clarius’s own about page names Laurent Pelissier as its founder and describes him as the founder of Ultrasonix.

Ultrasonix Medical Corporation was itself a Vancouver sonography equipment maker. English Wikipedia’s article on Analogic, the American medical technology company, says Ultrasonix was founded in 2000 and acquired by Analogic in 2013, and that its manufacturing plants in Vancouver and in Englewood, Colorado, were closed after the acquisition. Clarius was founded the following year.

The link between the two companies is part of how Clarius presents itself. Its about page says the company was founded by “experienced innovators” who had worked in the ultrasound industry for two decades, lists a chief technology officer who also came from Ultrasonix, and says its developers created what it calls the first PC-based platform for ultrasound research and the first touch-screen ultrasound system. Those are the company’s own descriptions of earlier work.

The founding idea, as Pelissier puts it on the company’s site, had three parts: an ultra-portable system for medical professionals that did not give up image quality, no cords, and an app that worked with both iOS and Android phones and tablets.

A scanner that talks to a phone.

A Clarius scanner is a single handheld unit that connects wirelessly to an ordinary smartphone or tablet, where the Clarius App shows the image; Export Development Canada described the device in 2024 as about the size of a smartphone, connecting to off-the-shelf phones and tablets. The company says it sold its first wireless handheld scanner in December 2016, and that more than 40,000 clinicians have since used Clarius scanners for more than six million scans. It describes image quality as its core guiding principle, and its about page calls the company a pioneer in miniaturising ultrasound.

The current range is sold as the HD3 generation, and in 2024 Export Development Canada called the company’s products its third generation. Each model is named for its probe type and frequency: linear scanners such as the L7 HD3, L15 HD3 and L20 HD3 for shallow structures such as muscles, tendons and nerves; the C3 HD3 convex scanner for deeper imaging in primary care; a phased-array model for the heart; a multipurpose model for abdominal, vascular and cardiac views; and a veterinary model for small animals. The company lists a specialty for each, from emergency medicine and musculoskeletal care to aesthetics and plastic surgery.

Software is a large part of the offer. Clarius groups its automated features under the name Clarius Intelligence, including voice controls, automatic gain and AI tools that it says are available only in approved regions, and a training mode, T-Mode, for specific examinations. The company also runs Clarius Cloud for storing and sharing scans, and a teaching programme called Clarius Classroom.

On where the scanners are made, Export Development Canada wrote in 2024 that every device is manufactured and shipped out of Vancouver, and that the company’s intellectual property and venture capital came from Canada; it also said Clarius sells in 58 countries.

Clarius lists its own recognitions on its site: it says TIME named it among the world’s top health-tech companies of 2026, and it cites a Frost & Sullivan company-of-the-year award for ultraportable ultrasound in North America and a place on a Fast Company list of innovative medical device companies.

Imaging makers and how they 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.

A private Vancouver company with a phone-first product.

Clarius’s leadership has shifted over the years. In October 2024 Export Development Canada quoted Ohad Arazi as the company’s president and chief executive; the company’s about page in November 2026 lists Laurent Pelissier as founder and chief executive, alongside a board and a medical advisory board.

The company’s stated mission is about reach rather than hardware. Its about page says that as many as 25 million medical professionals worldwide do not have access to medical imaging, and that Clarius aims to make imaging available in every setting with portable, affordable and easy-to-use scanners. Export Development Canada repeated that figure in 2024 and described the company as a health-tech scale-up selling in many countries, with a particular interest in markets in the Indo-Pacific.

Its brand is built around the phone rather than the hospital cart. The scanners are sold through the company’s own website with demos and quotes, and the site is published in English, German, Spanish, Japanese and French. Product names are short and technical — a letter for the probe type, a number, and the HD3 generation mark — while the company’s writing leans on plain words such as “wireless,” “handheld” and “affordable.”

For a design guide, Clarius shows how a medical device brand can be organised around an app and a single handheld object. Compare Butterfly Network, another maker of phone-connected handheld ultrasound, and Fujifilm Sonosite, a long-standing maker of portable ultrasound systems. For this guide we use a deep navy, gel white and a harbour cyan with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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