Brainlab SE

Is Brainlab publicly traded? No. Brainlab is privately held. It postponed a planned Frankfurt Stock Exchange IPO in July 2025 and has said a listing remains under consideration.

Who owns Brainlab? Founder Stefan Vilsmeier owns roughly half the company, private equity firm EMH Partners holds about 35 percent, and employees and others hold the balance. Vilsmeier chairs the Administrative Board; Rainer Birkenbach is CEO.

What does Brainlab make? Surgical navigation and planning software and hardware for neurosurgery, spine, ENT, and orthopedic procedures, plus radiosurgery and radiotherapy planning systems such as ExacTrac.

Where is Brainlab headquartered? Munich, Germany, at Olof-Palme-Strasse 9. It employs about 2,100 people across 23 to 25 locations and sells in about 120 countries.

Stefan Vilsmeier founded Brainlab in Munich in 1989, financing the company with proceeds from a book on 3D graphics he wrote as a teenager after dropping out of a computer science degree. The first product, a mouse-driven surgical planning and navigation program, appeared in 1990 and was shown at the Congress of Neurological Surgeons in 1992.

Through the 1990s and 2000s Brainlab expanded from planning software into full navigation systems, then into radiosurgery through partnerships and the Novalis brand. Growth was steady rather than explosive, roughly 10 percent annually for two decades, funded internally and later by private equity firm EMH Partners, which built a stake of about 35 percent.

Vilsmeier ran the company as CEO until the end of 2024, then moved to chair the governance board as Rainer Birkenbach took over as chief executive in January 2025. That June the company converted from a German AG to a European SE and launched an IPO process on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. The offering, expected to value Brainlab at around 3 billion euros, was postponed on July 1, 2025 after some investors withdrew orders amid market volatility. The company has said a listing remains under consideration.

Brainlab emphasizes employee participation, and its 2025 SE conversion included a new employee share agreement. Its environmental footprint is modest for a device maker, concentrated in Munich engineering and assembly. The company frames its mission around digitizing medical workflows to improve outcomes.

The withdrawn July 2025 IPO drew scrutiny after Bloomberg reported that some investors pulled orders days before trading was to start, a public setback for Frankfurt's listing market. The company operates in a regulated medical device environment with no major recent recall or compliance scandal of record.