Startup Spotlight: Adialante wants to bring MRI scans to clinics by truck

Why it matters

Adialante is testing whether expensive diagnostic hardware can be sold like infrastructure-as-a-service, with clinics buying scans instead of machines.

Adialante co-founders Efrain Torres and Parker Jenkins are trying to turn MRI from a hospital capital purchase into a mobile service that pulls up to a clinic, scans patients on site, and bills the practice per scan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiRwpHPFIeM

The San Francisco company, listed by Y Combinator in its Spring 2026 batch, is starting with pre-biopsy prostate MRI for urology clinics. Adialante says on its site that first clinic deployments are planned for Q4 2026, with breast, orthopedics, brain and whole-body imaging on the roadmap after prostate.

Torres and Jenkins have been working on the underlying MRI architecture for years. In Adialante's YC launch page, Torres wrote that the founders met on the first floor of their engineering dorm and trained as biomedical engineers before building the company. Marquette, where Torres earned a biomedical engineering degree in 2019, reported on April 23rd, 2026 that Jenkins was also a Marquette engineering classmate and is now Adialante's COO and co-founder.

The founder story matters because Adialante is a hardware, healthcare operations and reimbursement bet packed into one startup. Torres grew up on Chicago's South Side and later earned a PhD in biomedical engineering at the University of Minnesota, where his research focused on making MRI technology cheaper and more accessible, according to a University of Minnesota profile. A 2021 paper in Magnetic Resonance in Medicine described Torres's work on frequency-modulated Rabi-encoded echoes, or FREE, a method intended to reduce MRI cost and improve accessibility by eliminating pulsed field gradient hardware.

Adialante's claim is that a different scanner architecture lets the company lower the operational burden enough to sell imaging access instead of selling machines. In the YC launch, Adialante said its MRIs use 50% less hardware, are 40% shorter and 80% lighter, and require no specialized infrastructure. Adialante's current site says the service is "mobile by design," needs no shielded room, construction or capital purchase for clinics, and will charge a flat fee per scan while the clinic collects insurance reimbursement.

That business model is the sharper part of the pitch. Traditional MRI access is constrained by hospital equipment budgets, room buildouts, scheduling backlogs and referral leakage from clinics that cannot image patients in house. Adialante wants urology practices to keep that workflow inside the practice: the mobile unit arrives, the patient is scanned on site, Adialante earns a per-scan fee, and the clinic keeps the reimbursement spread after paying Adialante.

Adialante is presenting early demand through letters of intent rather than revenue. At the time of Adialante's YC launch, Adialante said it had 6 clinics signed up, $12.75 million in LOIs for scanner utilization, $30,000 deposited by a top-ten urology clinic, and an assembled MRI. Adialante's own site now says 11 clinics have reserved slots and lists $19.75 million in signed LOIs, measured as total contract value.

LOIs are useful signal in medtech sales because they show clinic willingness to engage before deployment. They are still a long way from paid scans, insurance reimbursement flowing through a practice, or proof that a mobile MRI schedule can sustain utilization across multiple clinics. Adialante has not disclosed named clinic customers, per-scan pricing, gross margin, FDA clearance status, or the capital cost of each mobile unit.

The regulatory gap is the main constraint on the story. Fogarty Innovation, which profiled Adialante in 2024, said Torres and Jenkins were aiming to demonstrate clinical efficacy and obtain FDA clearance before moving toward Series A funding. Adialante's current site describes its imaging as diagnostic-grade and says the first clinics go live in Q4 2026, but the public materials do not disclose a cleared indication.

The financing picture is also still incomplete. Marquette reported in April that YC came with a $500,000 investment. Fogarty Innovation reported in 2024 that Adialante had raised $1.5 million in seed funding from the University of Minnesota, the state of Minnesota, the National Science Foundation and angel investors. Adialante's site now says the company has won more than $3 million in grants, including an NSF SBIR Phase II.

Investor chatter around the YC Spring 2026 batch has also attached Adialante to a large uncapped seed and Paul Graham. The verified public record stops short of that. Public materials reviewed for this story verify YC backing and point to Pioneer Fund support, but they do not disclose a new seed size, cap, valuation, or Graham investment in Adialante. Until those terms are public or otherwise confirmed, the operative financing facts are the YC investment, the previously reported seed and grant support, and the LOIs Adialante is using to show demand.

Adialante's team has grown beyond the two founders. The current site lists Torres as CEO and co-founder, Jenkins as COO and co-founder, Sai Abitha Srinivas as principal systems engineer, Michael Mullen as principal software engineer, Daniel Pizetta as staff software engineer, Kyle King as CFO, and Nabil Othman as software engineer. That staffing mix tracks the nature of the problem: scanner physics, software reconstruction, mobile operations, clinic sales and reimbursement math have to work together.

Adialante's first market, prostate imaging, is a narrow entry point by design. The YC launch says more than 1 million men each year require an MRI before a prostate biopsy, while most urology clinics cannot offer one in house. If Adialante can deliver comparable image quality in a mobile workflow, Adialante gets a repeatable route into private practices before attempting broader screening markets.

The larger ambition is heavier. Adialante says its goal is "an MRI at every clinic in the world." The first test is much smaller and more concrete: whether Torres and Jenkins can get a mobile prostate MRI unit into clinics in Q4 2026, convert LOIs into utilization, and prove that a per-scan model can absorb the capital, regulatory and operating complexity that hospitals have historically owned.