Resonant Link Medical hires medtech vet from Abbott as CEO

Resonant Link Medical has hired Omari Bouknight as CEO of the medtech supplier, which makes wireless power and data transfer technology for implants.

Bouknight was most recently divisional VP of U.S. commercial for Abbott’s structural heart business. Before that he served as president and chief commercial officer at CardioFocus, sales and marketing VP at Cardiac Dimensions and business unit director at Thoratec, where he led the HeartMate II left ventricular assist device (LVAD) launch.

“We’re really excited about our platform. It’s very innovative,” Bouknight said in an exclusive interview with Medical Design & Outsourcing ahead of his first day as CEO. “Essentially, what we’re doing is correcting for the issues I faced in those early days working with left ventricular assist devices.”

“The only way historically that you’ve been able to provide power to those devices is by including a small cord called the drive line, or percutaneous lead, which comes out of the body, plugs into a micro computer called a system controller, and that attaches to external batteries that the patient wears during their daily life,” he said. “This has significant limitations: showering, patients can’t swim, traveling with these batteries can be quite awkward. It can be difficult to really get back to the lifestyle that the device enables them to get to. That stuck with me, and around 2005 we started to look at different ways that we might be able to wirelessly pass power from outside the body to inside.”

Bouknight replaces Resonant Link co-founder and former CEO Grayson Zulauf, who said on LinkedIn he was “ecstatic” for Bouknight to lead “an incredible existing team [working] to make every implantable device rechargeable in the next decade.”

Co-founder Aaron Stein will remain chief technology officer.

“Omari is the ideal leader to scale Resonant Link Medical’s vision and impact — expanding the reach of implantable medical devices, accelerating innovation for industry partners, and ultimately transforming patient outcomes,” said Features Capital co-founder and Managing Partner Jeff Chu, whose venture capital firm let Resonant Link Medical’s Series A funding round earlier this year.

“His deep expertise in advancing medical technologies, combined with a proven track record of commercializing them across diverse applications, makes him uniquely suited to lead Resonant Link Medical into its next phase of growth,” Chu continued in a statement shared with Medical Design & Outsourcing. “We are excited to leverage Omari’s clinical, commercial, and product leadership to shape the future of implantable devices through Resonant Link Medical’s enabling wireless power technology.”

Resonant Link Medical’s technology

Resonant Link Medical’s designed its wireless power transfer technology to quickly, safely and conveniently recharge a variety of implants as devices get more advanced and smaller. The company said its technology has been used in more than 50 devices, including ventricular assist devices, neurostimulators, brain-computer interfaces, and diagnostic devices.

“What we’re seeing is the ability to reduce recharge times by as much as 10 times, so if you had an implantable rechargeable battery that took hours to recharge before, we’re able to charge it in minutes,” Bouknight said.

Resonant Link Medical — formerly known as Resonant Link until it refocused entirely on medical devices in January 2025 in conjunction with the Series A round — has offices in Boston, Zurich and South Burlington, Vermont. The company says its customers range from startups to Fortune 500 companies.

“Having a full medical focus is the way to go for the future, because that’s where the biggest challenges are, but it’s also where the market is going,” Bouknight said. “If you look at the growth rates in terms of implantable medical devices, active implantables right now are growing at about two times the rate of non-active implantables. Within the next couple years, 50% of the market will be active implantables, if you think about all of implantable devices holistically.”

Resonant Link Medical is betting on the shift toward recharging implant batteries instead of replacing them, which carries risks of complications during retrieval procedures. Wireless power also allows for smaller batteries — or in some cases, no internal batteries at all — and thus smaller devices, which can be placed closer to the disease state they’re intended for, whether that be chronic pain, epilepsy, depression, sleep apnea or heart failure.

“There’s massive patient implications to be essentially untethered from the charging that they’ve had before, as well as the idea of being able to give them smarter, smaller, longer-lasting devices,” he said.

The company plans to hire more engineers in Boston, and Bouknight said the ideal candidates are ” forward-thinking from a technology perspective” and able to deeply understand the needs of the company’s customers — especially those who need custom systems — and the patients these devices will ultimately serve.

“Our ideal customer is one that has a very patient-centric focus. I was very fortunate early on in my career that I had the ability to have a lot of patient interface, and when you’re thinking about designing devices a lot of times you have separation from the patient. You’re thinking about the right materials, you’re thinking about function, and you’re thinking about safety, but potentially in a very esoteric way. What you might not be thinking about is patient lifestyle.”

“I’ll never forget one of the first conversations I had with a design engineer when we were focusing on advancing the LVAD technology,” he continued. “The engineer — just not really knowing — made a casual comment that these patients just sit around all day anyway. And the answer was no, that’s not why the patient is getting the implant. In fact, if you look at the data, patients evaluate quality of life just as much as they evaluate extension of life when they’re considering medical options. We have to think about designing devices that allow our patients to have full restoration of quality of life, and if you offer a device that helps them feel a lot better but still has major restrictions on their quality of life, that’s not going to win in the marketplace. So we really want to partner with customers, OEMs, manufacturers who are visionary and innovators that want full restoration of all aspects of patient quality of life. Those are areas where we really shine.”