If the sound of “Auld Lang Syne” is starting to queue up in your head, you know the year is coming to a close. The Scottish poem/folk song turned New Year’s hallmark is generally belted out at the stroke of midnight on December 31 as revelers close the chapter on one year and welcome in the next.

2020 has been an unprecedented year in more ways than one. COVID-19 has brought upon many challenges and hardships that much of the world has had to cope with. Here at Promaxo we have been beyond grateful to continue our work to increase the standard of care and make the MRI more accessible to all.

And while 2020 is a year many people will be happy to forget, we’d prefer to reflect on the accomplishments Promaxo had as an organization this year. Instead of focusing on the areas where COVID-19 forced us to take a step back, we want to highlight what brought us one step closer to redefining the standard of care by improving the quality and speed of patient screening and intervention.  

Life BC (that’s “before COVID”) seems like a lifetime ago, but back in January we kicked off the year by announcing an $8 million round of financing from a group of super angels and strategic investors. We celebrated that milestone with an appearance at the J.P. Morgan 38th Annual Healthcare Conference, where our CEO Amit Vohra participated in a panel discussion on how companies can approach and benefit from cross-border partnerships.

On the heels of that appearance, Promaxo was selected for Accelerate, Startup Grind’s community designed to provide promising startups with exposure for accelerating growth. More than 4,000 startups applied for consideration, and Promaxo was in the top 1% selected for this year’s program.

February also saw Promaxo receive a feature story in Entrepreneur. That piece, titled “Imaging And Robotic Platform Plans To Revolutionize Healthcare,” helped propel us forward in getting the word out to the masses about our portable MRI device. So did being named a 2020 Innovation Leader at Life Science Intelligence’s Emerging MedTech Summit later that month.

Around this time, COVID started gaining steam, and the world changed. On April 9, we celebrated World Health Day in a way we never thought possible—by thanking frontline health care workers who were working tirelessly to fight the spread of a global virus.

While much of the world came to a grinding halt, we knew we had to keep going.

We overcame financing challenges and delays presented by the pandemic and still closed our first tranche of Series B-1 funding in May. With direct impacts on both future investments and organizational restrictions, Amit and our entire leadership team worked tirelessly in the throes of COVID-19 to balance the company’s needs with the safety and well-being of our staff.

As an organization, we acted quickly to develop a plan for a company-wide work schedule, working in shifts to minimize in-person interaction, consistently communicating all critical timelines and checkpoints in a work-from-home environment.

In the best of times, startups like us will have the deck stacked against them—let alone during a pandemic. But despite those obstacles, Promaxo has been able to thrive and move forward.

We celebrated the second anniversary of our company moving to Oakland, a city that has been a blessing and a community that has welcomed our team with open arms. In August, our advisory team grew as we added Dr. Senthil Nathan, Dr. John Adams Jr. and Dr. Clare Tempany to the organization as medical advisors.

Dr. Nathan works at the University College Hospital and the Royal Free Hospital in London, as well as serves as a trustee among numerous educational organizations, including the SNJ Educational & Charitable Trust, the SNJ Education Fund, and the Prostate Cancer Research Foundation. A diagnostic radiologist and an expert in prostate cancer MR imaging and image-guided interventions, Dr. Tempany is the Ferenc A. Jolesz professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School and works at Brigham Health in Boston.

Because our company is committed to flipping the paradigm of prostate disease management on its head, September’s Prostate Cancer Awareness Month was particularly important to us. We celebrated by helping to shed light on prostate cancer with some eye-opening facts on our blog and relaying the story of a son who lost his father to the disease.

In the midst of the month-long celebration of Prostate Cancer Awareness Month, we received word of approval for an in-house clinical study from WIRB-Copernicus Group (WCG). Not only are we honored to be partnering with WCG, one of the world’s leading providers of solutions that measurably improve the quality and efficiency of clinical research, but we recognize how impactful this study will be toward optimizing the Promaxo MRI system.

More good news came the following month when Amit was elected to the Forbes Business Council, an invitation-only club that enables our fearless leader to contribute content on health care technology and innovation for Forbes.com.

Things got a little hairy—and we say that in the best way possible—in November as our team participated in #NoShaveNovember to raise awareness about men’s health issues. Throughout the month, we shared pictures on Facebook and LinkedIn of our team in various stages of facial hair growth (including our ladies who donned iconic fake mustaches for our weekly photoshoot).

We also were pleased to announce the incorporation of a subsidiary called Neuro42, focusing on portable head and brain MRI, through an exclusive worldwide license of the low-field MR imaging technology developed at Dr. Lawrence Wald’s lab at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging.

In addition, we were thrilled to announce our partnership with Huami, a global provider of smart consumer health and industrial health technologies, for joint technology, commercialization and market development opportunities. Partnering with Huami provides new opportunities for Promaxo to leverage its technical innovation and accelerate market penetration.

Now in December, we are closer than ever to officially launching the Promaxo MRI system in physician offices around the country. What a ride it has been.

So, join us as we raise a glass to everything we’ve accomplished this year and as we remain committed to better outcomes and improving the standard of care. Here’s to transforming the lives of patients and doctors in 2021 and beyond.