Our Story

Flywheel’s Origins

Early days. Dr. Brian Wandell, Director of the Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging at Stanford University, recognized a number of years ago that the growth and complexity of research data sets posed a challenge: labs needed a better way to carry out advanced medical imaging research.

In response to this need, Wandell partnered with his colleague, Gunnar Schaefer, to develop a system that captures images from MRI scanners, organizes and curates the images into a database, and provides users with a web interface for viewing and sharing the data. The result was so successful that other collaborators leaving Stanford wanted to take the system with them. Wandell and Schaefer knew they had something that could fill a real need, and help accelerate imaging research and collaboration worldwide.

In 2015 Wandell and Schaefer partnered with Minnesota-based Invenshure to create a product from the idea born at Stanford. Since then, Flywheel has grown into a comprehensive solution for pharmaceutical companies, providers, payors, system integrators, AI developers and academic medical centers to manage their research and machine learning workflows.

In 2021, after just over five years on the market, Flywheel expanded its capabilities and feature sets with the acquisition of Radiologics, creating a single imaging data and AI that accelerates research and machine learning development for healthcare innovation. Today, the Flywheel platform includes Flywheel Enterprise, our flagship imaging research data platform; Flywheel Data Exchange, a catalog of curated datasets; and Flywheel Discovery, a cohort discovery tool.

Flywheel’s unparalleled end-to-end data and AI solutions are opening new possibilities for users around the world.