"The big question is whether InMode will remain in Israel," says company founder and CEO Moshe Mizrahy, talking to "Globes". The background is a control battle over the Israeli aesthetic medicine company in which Mizrahy is playing an active part.
For the time being, the battle for control is providing a following wind for InMode’s (Nasdaq: INMD) share price, such as has not been seen for a long time. Between 2019 and 2023 InMode was one of the big successes of Israel’s biomed industry on Nasdaq. At its peak, it had a market cap of over $7 billion, and annual revenue of $500 million. InMode was, and still is, a highly profitable company. Up until a year ago it had accumulated $1 billion cash from operations.
In late 2023, however, the success cooled. InMode started to miss estimates and its revenue shrank. It suffered from pressure from small investors and short sellers. Its current share price, which is down 84% from the peak, gives it a market cap of $950 million.
InMode’s offices are in Yokne’am, and it employs 120 people in Israel out of a total workforce of 650. It also employs several sub-contractors, chiefly the Medimor factory in Tiberias, which employs 200 people; 70% of its production is for InMode. "The uncertainty about the future is causing a sense of insecurity among the workers, who don’t know whether we will continue to manage the company and whether its activity will remain in Israel," Mizrahy says.
Mizrahy, 72, founded InMode with his own money, built it in his image almost without external investment, and says that he has so far gained about $200 million from sales of the company’s shares. He retains a 5.5% stake. As the person who has headed the company since it was founded, he has been the object of criticism from investors over the way he runs it, criticism that he took deeply to heart. "There’s a connection between the wave of populism flooding the world to what happened at InMode," he says.
"It’s populism because the shareholders say ‘I am the people’, the only element here with a voice, and the management is the ‘professional elite’ whose know-how is of no interest and which should have no real say in decisions.
"The shareholders don’t care about other stakeholders in the company, such as the employees, the subcontractors, or the country itself. Their approach is not long term and not based on professionalism. This isn’t just happening to us. It’s a phenomenon. It’s no coincidence that in 2024-2025 there were 250 attacks by activist investors on Wall Street companies."
Fire people, they told me. I refused.
Moshe Mizrahy, an engineer by training, who in the past was involved in the management of aesthetic medicine companies Lumenis and Syneron, founded InMode in 2007 together with Dr. Michael Kreindel, the company’s chief technology officer.
The company developed new aesthetic medicine technologies, including products that replace surgery, based on radio wave radiation. Radio waves can reach deep layers of the skin and fat where, the company claims, they encourage the production of collagen and the reformation of the tissue.
"These were the last days of Pompei," is how Mizrahy recalls the beginning. "Euphoria, swinish capitalism, super-liberalism. In 2005, Thomas Friedman wrote that the world was flat, that there were no borders. And no-one understood that under the surface this liberalism was expressed in a lack of regulation.
"Five months after I founded the company, the subprime crisis broke in the US. Thirty years of liberalism and globalism as a social narrative were wiped out in one day. At that time I realized that there was no money, no venture capital, and that the company would depend on what money we had. It would have to do. And so from its founding to its flotation on Wall Street InMode raised just $5 million.
"The company’s DNA is built out of events like these. We developed the products in two rooms in Haifa. The market has no money, and we sell to the few who have and keep the company running on fumes, somehow, from hand to mouth. There were periods with no salaries, and to retain the employees we distributed 30% of the company to them in shares.
"As time went by the swinish capitalism moderated, and in 2019 they started talking for the first time about social and environmental responsibilities of traded companies. Not just their shareholders. That’s the year in which we float the company on Nasdaq and write explicitly in the prospectus that we work for all the stakeholders - patients, doctors, employees, subcontractors, and shareholders.
"I was warned of the possible reaction to a sentence like that," Mizrahy admits, "and I answered that it was in the spirit of the times. And the truth is that when I did the roadshow, no-one uttered a word of criticism of that sentence.
"And what happens a year later? The Covid pandemic. Then everything is forgotten. All the companies fire people, there’s no solidarity. For four months we had no sales. Fire people, they said to me. I didn’t fire a single one. We kept every employee, and kept in touch with the customers, and in 2022 we had all the conditions and capabilities for breaking into the market fast, and we made the big leap."
An activist threat amidst war
Then war broke out in Israel. Not every medical device company was hurt by it, but Mizrahy claims that InMode was materially damaged, by the drafting of employees into the reserves, difficulties in production and transport, and also because of the anti-Israel atmosphere. "In January each year there’s a convention in Paris of aesthetic medicine companies. We would rent dozens of rooms every year. This year we called them in November and they said, we don’t want to rent to you, we don’t want trouble."
At the same time high interest rates have also weighed on InMode in recent years and made it difficult for medical clinics, which represent its main market, to buy InMode’s products and for customers to finance the treatments that it offers. All these factors led to a decline in revenue, from $492 million in 2023 to $370 million in 2025 (on the basis of preliminary results), a decline of 25%. Net profit, which in the peak year was almost $200 million, was also eroded.
With missed guidance and declining results, internal pressures arose as well. In the case of InMode it was an activist investment fund from Florida called Doma, which holds 4.5% of the shares. "Two years ago they started driving the management and board crazy," Mizrahy relates. "They started saying that the company was incorrectly managed, that I as a manager wasn’t doing what they told me to do. They wanted the company to carry out a large buyback of its shares. We had $1 billion cash, earmarked for a significant acquisition, and they threatened legal proceedings in the middle of the war - ‘Why didn’t you take production out of Israel to reduce risk and cut costs?’"
At that time a lawsuit, which was eventually dismissed, was filed against the company on the basis of research on The Capital Forum website, which in the past was said to be connected with a short-seller company. "They said that we were misleading the FDA, that we were selling devices and then hiding the fact that they were returned to us. It was all lies, and the lawsuit was dismissed out of hand," Mizrahy says.
"And amidst all that, the world turned populist. Trump was elected, and we had what happened in Israel. It’s exactly the populism that we had in business - one activist attacks, suddenly it’s a herd. They say, ‘If you don’t cooperate with us, we won’t cooperate with your dealings,’ and the board says to itself, ‘Why quarrel?’"
Under pressure from investors, Mizrahy was forced to give up the role of chairperson of InMode and remain as CEO only, and the company carried out a share buyback to the tune of $500 million. "They persuaded the board to approve the share buyback. If all that hadn’t happened, we would probably have acquired a large complementary business in the filler materials - hyaluronic acids and botoxes - something with innovative technology which would have added to the bottom line immediately."
Mizrahy has said in the past that until mid-2024 he had not found the right company that would agree to be acquired on his terms, "and after that I couldn’t do it in a market in which everything was slowing down." InMode therefore focused on expanding its product line and expanding geographically, in the expectation that interest rates would come down.
b>To do good things, without the public
The Doma fund’s belligerency, Mizrahy says, affected the InMode board. "It takes time but in the end it penetrates. The desire to go back to being a privately-held company arises from, among other things, the desire to get them off our backs. Running the company has become unpleasant."
When InMode’s board decided recently to put the company up for sale, and hired Bank of America to coordinate the move, Mizrahy told me that he would be prepared to join any winning group if it promised to keep production and development in Israel, and allocate 15% of the company’s capital in options for the employees. "Among the bidders, only the investor group of Meir Shamir (which includes Mizrahy himself, G. W.) agreed," he says.
Mizrahy loves the idea of InMode becoming privately-held again. "We’ll be able to do beautiful things in the company not under the prying eyes of the public. And perhaps after we succeed we’ll be able to take it back to the stock exchange," he says, adding that he intends to reinvest in the company in its new guise the $200 million that he gained from InMode’s flotation.
The battle for InMode
There are three bidders for InMode. Two bidders in the official process led by Bank of America for selling the company outright are private equity firm Centroid of South Korea, and a group of Israeli and US investors that includes Meir Shamir, controlling shareholder in Mivtach Shamir Holdings, and Mizrahy himself.
These two are offering $1-1.1 billion for the company ($16-17 per share). The deadline for final bids is in mid-February.
According to Mizrahy, the group in which he is a partner is supported by 40 senior managers and employees at InMode, and it intends to keep the company’s existing activity in Israel, and to distribute 15% of the company as options to the employees. The Korean firm has made no commitment to keep the company in Israel, and at present it is not acting in cooperation with the management.
At the end of last week a third bidder emerged, not through the official process. A US-based firm called Steel Partners, which holds 1.3% of InMode, approached the shareholders in writing. It is offering to buy 51% of the company for $18 per share, valuing it at $1.13 billion. This represents a 29% premium on the share price before speculation about the sale of the company was reported a week ago (versus a 25% premium in the other two offers).
"Abysmal" return
In its letter Steel Capital states that InMode’s return for investors in recent years has been "abysmal", and that there is no justification for it holding $532 million cash.
"Steel Partners would seek to help the Company pursue targeted, strategic M&A that could expand InMode’s product portfolio, geographic reach, and capabilities," the letter states.
Among investors with small stakes in InMode are investment giant BlackRock, JP Morgan, Meitav, and Goldman Sachs, and the founders Mizrahy (5.5%) and Kreindel (4.9%).
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on February 1, 2026.
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