Adelante is making whole-body MRI scans 10x cheaper with a mobile trailer that shows up outside clinics

Adelante

Whole-body MRI scans currently run $2,500 to $3,500 at competitors like Pernuvo. Adelante charges $250. That 10x price gap is the company in a sentence.

The hardware making it possible is 80% lighter and 60% more power-efficient than conventional MRI systems, and eight times quieter. Adelante loads the equipment into a Ford F-350 trailer and parks it outside partner clinics, cutting the infrastructure overhead that drives costs at fixed-site competitors. Crucially, Adelante doesn't sell the machines — it sells scans. That model, combined with a 10-to-12-year system lifespan, is what Torres says produces a 55% gross margin at the $250 price point.

“Pernuvo, if you look at their pricing, they're $2,500. And it can go up to $3,500. We're around 10 times cheaper than everything on the market... We have 11 LOIs already, $19,750,000, and we're deploying this year based on traditional MRIs.”

The FDA path and the bridge strategy

Adelante's proprietary system still needs FDA clearance, targeted for Q1 2028 as a Class II 510(k). The regulatory risk is relatively contained because MRI technology has deep precedent — the hazard zone is first-of-kind devices and therapeutic applications, not imaging hardware with established comparators.

Rather than wait, Torres is deploying trailers using FDA-cleared conventional MRI systems this year, building the distribution network and customer relationships ahead of the technology transition. The plan is to get five to ten trailers operating at breakeven, then swap in Adelante's own hardware when clearance comes through in 2028, at which point the unit economics flip sharply positive.

Traction

11 LOIs representing $19.75M in committed interest. Torres says the current fundraising round is nearly full, with a small allocation remaining for non-lead investors and active conversations underway with potential leads.

Investor interest is coming from deep tech, generalists, and health tech — Torres attributes the broad appeal partly to how well-understood the MRI market has become after Pernuvo raised the category's profile, and partly to the personal resonance of missed diagnoses.

The IP behind Adelante's system originated in grad school, where Torres and his co-founder built toward a startup in the MRI space from the start. Adelante holds exclusive rights to the resulting patent.