Cutera Brand Guidelines: The California Laser Maker That Began as Acme Medical in 1998

Six engineers from Coherent.

Cutera began in August 1998 as Acme Medical, Inc., according to the company’s entry in the International Directory of Company Histories, published by Gale. Its founders were Kevin P. Connors, who became chief executive, and David A. Gollnick, who led research, together with four colleagues from Coherent Medical Group, the medical division of the California laser maker Coherent. Connors had run that division as president from 1996; he left in June 1998, and Gollnick followed a month later.

The new firm set up in a garage in Palo Alto. Its only founding investor was MedVenture, the venture fund of Annette Campbell-White, which put in its first money in October 1998, Gale says. The founders set out to build a new generation of laser and light-based systems for all skin types, including tanned skin, using longer wavelengths that the field had largely set aside. They also planned to sell a base system first and later offer buyers new applications as plug-ins, rather than asking them to replace the whole machine every few years. Gale presents that upgradable approach as the thing that set the company apart in a crowded field of medical lasers, and as a way to reach doctors beyond dermatology and plastic surgery.

Clinical evaluation began in December 1998. In June 1999 the US Food and Drug Administration allowed the company to market a laser for vascular lesions, including leg and facial veins; a month later Acme became Altus Medical, Inc., and later that year it began selling its first product, CoolGlide, from a small facility in Burlingame. Cutera’s own website today describes its founders as “veteran laser and optical engineers who envisioned that technology should and could do more.”

CoolGlide, Xeo and a new name.

CoolGlide grew into a platform. Gale records FDA permission for hair removal in June 2000 and, in January 2001, for permanent hair reduction on all skin types with the CoolGlide CV, which it calls the first long-pulse 1064nm laser to receive such clearance. The CoolGlide Excel, for leg veins, followed in March 2001 and the CoolGlide Vantage, for skin texture, in 2002. In August 2001 Altus took the North American rights to distribute the Medlite C, a tattoo and pigment laser made by Continuum Electro Optics of Santa Clara.

Altus filed for a stock-market listing in early 2002 but postponed it that summer as markets weakened, Gale says. In 2003 it added a second upgradable platform, Xeo, which combined lasers with Intelligent Pulsed Light. At the start of 2004 the company changed its name to Cutera, Inc. and moved to a larger site in Brisbane, California; its initial public offering followed in March 2004, and its shares traded on Nasdaq under the symbol CUTR. The same year brought the Xeo SA, a compact tabletop platform called Solera, and Titan, an infrared system designed to work with both platforms. By then, Gale says, Cutera sold its systems in some 30 countries, to primary care doctors and gynaecologists as well as dermatologists and plastic surgeons.

Today Cutera’s website groups its treatments under headings such as acne, body sculpting, skin revitalization, pigment, vascular, hair removal and tattoo removal, and lists products including AviClear, excel V+, truSculpt and xeo+. Several of those names are written in lower case, with the Xeo name of 2003 now styled as xeo+. The company’s strapline is “Setting the Standard,” and its About page opens with a four-word line, “Look good. Feel good.”

Design and documentation.

Makers of aesthetic lasers and energy-based devices sell to clinicians first and to their patients second, and their brand material is built for both. The usual product image is a tall white console on castors, with a touchscreen and one or more handpieces on coiled cables, photographed in a softly lit treatment room. The machines are designed to look at home in a clinic and in a medical spa alike.

Around the hardware sits a familiar visual language: close-ups of glowing skin, clinicians in white coats, pale backgrounds, generous white space and clean, light sans-serif type. Product names tend to be short coined words, often styled with trademark symbols, and families are extended with suffixes such as Pro, Plus or a version number. Colour is usually held back to one accent against white, grey and skin tones.

Much of the industry’s calendar runs through medical congresses rather than consumer shows. AMWC, the Aesthetic & Anti-Aging Medicine World Congress; IMCAS in Paris; and the annual meeting of the American Society for Laser Medicine and Surgery (ASLMS) are among the places where new systems are shown to doctors. Candela, for example, says it unveiled its Vbeam Pro at the 2025 ASLMS meeting and launched its Glacē system in Europe at IMCAS in January 2026.

The companies behind these brands have changed hands often, through mergers, private-equity buyouts and restructurings, and several now trade under names different from the ones they started with. This guide sets out who founded each maker, who owns it now and what it says about its own products, and gives the company’s claims as its own.

From Nasdaq to private ownership.

Cutera’s two decades as a listed company ended in 2025. In March that year it filed a voluntary, “pre-packaged” Chapter 11 case in the United States, a restructuring agreed in advance with a group of lenders holding about 74 per cent of its notes, Financier Worldwide reported in its May 2025 issue. Its entities outside the US were not part of the filing, and it said it would keep operating normally during the court process. Its chief executive at the time, Taylor Harris, said the company would come out of the process as a private company “with a much stronger capital structure.”

On 1 May 2025 Cutera announced that it had completed the restructuring and emerged from Chapter 11, GuruFocus reported that day; it now operates as a privately held company, backed by a consortium of investment firms that the announcement did not name. BeautyMatter, reporting the filing in March 2025, described the company as headquartered in Brisbane, with direct sales and service operations in 11 countries outside the US and distributors in more than 30 further markets. Its website now lists offices in Australia, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, and names Ron Louks, who joined the board in June 2025, as interim chief executive.

Cutera describes its business as “the development and manufacturing of laser and energy-based aesthetic systems for dermatologists and other medical professionals,” in the statement quoted by Financier Worldwide, and calls itself “an energy device company” on its website.

For a design guide, Cutera shows how an engineering start-up built a brand on upgradable platforms and short product names, many of them set in lower case. Compare Candela, a laser maker founded in 1970, and Cynosure, the company Candela’s co-founder started after leaving it. For this guide we use a deep teal, a pale mist and a soft coral with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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