We're talking about medical devices here, and I think we're talking about surgery and anesthesia. Everybody in here, one time in life, will have a major surgery. It's going to happen sooner or later. You're all going to be under anesthesia, and anesthesia is called like the medical miracle. It's a complex procedure where anesthesiologists keep control of you, but it also requires a lot of monitoring to make sure that you are not subject to complications. Just to start somewhere, I mean, we started in the Amazonas. For centuries, the locals there have used what's called curare. It's a nerve toxin found in local plants. It's put on the pointer of the arrow, and when it hits the prey, it paralyzes the prey in like 15 seconds, and it suffocates the animal, which makes it dead.
The same type of toxin has been used in synthetic form on humans for about 70 years. About 100 million people every year get what's called paralytic drugs as part of anesthesia. When you're doing anesthesia, you know, you get gas to get unconscious and get to sleep, and you get paralytic drugs, so you get paralyzed and lie absolutely still. When you get this to humans, you get paralyzed in 45 seconds, which means that you can't breathe anymore, and you need to be on a ventilator. Just to show quickly the school of how it works. You can see on the graph here that they give you paralytics at the start of the procedure, and then you just go down into this paralytic phase where you just, you can't move.
Then you start metabolizing this, and they need to give you a little bit more, and then they give you an antidote drug, and then you start to wake up, and then they find the right time, okay, the drug is out of my body, it's safe to wake me up again. The problem with this is that about 40% of all patients are woken up too early. You end up, you know, leaving the operating room still partly paralyzed, and you get all kinds of complications. About 87% of all the patients get the wrong dose. With this, you know, you're driving a lot of complications. What we've done here is pioneered and revolutionized the way patients are monitored as they undergo anesthesia. We've developed what's called the TetraGraph system. We're originally a spinoff from the U.S.
The system consists of a monitor, it's in the operating room, and then various disposable sensors. You put these sensors on your nerve, you hook up to the human's nervous system non-invasively, and you give the patient small little electrical impulses that travel through your muscles and your nerves, and then you can measure what's the level of paralysis, like how paralyzed are you. It gives you an exact number for that so you can get the right dose of drugs, and you can wake up the patient at exactly the right time. We have about 5,000 of these monitors by now, so 5,000 operating rooms. We monitor nearly a million patients by now. We have 107 patents, and we're kind of the global leader in the sector.
The background of all this is that, you know, I said, this drug has been used for 70 years, and it's been monitored for different ways for the last 40 years. In the 1980s, you know, the doctors gave you a little electrical shock to see are you moving, and the variability of that was over 100%, meaning whatever they saw, it was completely wrong. In the 1990s came another technology where you did the same thing, but it measured like what happened to your hand when you give them electrical shock. The variability is like 50%, meaning that 50% of the times you use this, you get the wrong result, meaning that you give the wrong dose of drugs or you wake up too early and you're paralyzed. What we've done is our technology measures the direct response in the system with 99.7% accuracy.
This is the way to go in the future. When using our type of technology, it's been shown that you eliminate complications. You know exactly that the patient leaves the operating room without any problems, and you can reduce drug costs by 70% because everybody has a different drug dose. Me, you guys, we're going to have a five-fold difference in the way the number of drugs I need. This is how it's typically used. Often a robotic case, you can see the Da Vinci guy running the robot in the back. The anesthesiologist is on the other side of the drape. He's monitoring to make sure that the patient is always deeply blocked to make safe surgery happen. What we're trying to transform here is we want to get every single operating room in the world to transform to our technologies.
There's like 15,000 hospitals, about 10,000 of them already have this kind of legacy analog technology. There's about 80,000 of these legacy technologies, and of our type of technology, we have one, I would say, main competitor. There's about 6,000-8,000 of these monitors so far. In and around the world, about 40-50% of all patients are monitored. Whenever you're in surgery, tell the anesthesiologist to monitor you closely. We are a company in a very commercial phase. We launched, I would say, about, we launched in 2022, 2021, and we've grown the company very fast from about $10 million then to about $100 million this year. Growth this year, first nine months was 80%. Our sensor deliveries is growing very fast, good gross margin, of course, hit by U.S. tariffs and U.S.
Currency, fixed operating expenses, and we are moving towards profitability. What's important in our business, which is a typical medical device razor, razor blade business, is getting a lot of these monitors out there on the market, and that keeps growing. This year we shipped out over 1,700 monitors versus last year was just under 800. We're moving fast. Deliveries of the sensor are also increasing. Every single patient needs a sensor. Here I just showed, you know, on kids, you typically put them on the foot instead. We are targeting large hospital systems, and the U.S. is our main market, which is about 70% of our business. This year I've had a number of press releases. I can never say what the hospitals are, but it's large academic university hospital centers saying, okay, top down from the, we need to do this.
We need to be guideline compliant. We want to save money, and we want to make patients safe out of this. One deal I'm extra proud of was we won a contract a couple of weeks ago with the U.S. Department of Defense. We supplied the Walter Reed Hospital, which is where they treat all the U.S. presidents, the congressmen, and the people of the courts, and they have our technology there. If you like Trump, you can like that he's getting electrified by our technology, and if you don't like him, you can think the same thing. Okay. All right, so there's a number of building blocks. One behind this is the guidelines. The last 15 years is like country after country has adopted guidelines in our favor. The big ones was two years ago, U.S.
Europe came out at the same time and said everybody needs to be monitored. Stop this subjective assessment. Then came Japan, and then a couple of weeks ago came pediatrics saying that all kids need to be monitored too. Germany and just the other day came a society said that everybody needs to be intubated. They need to have a monitor to make sure that they're intubated at the right time. That is one building block. The other building block is partnerships. You can't win a hospital system without being best friends with every single medical device company out there. We have connectivity and license agreements with the major ones in our industry.
I just announced the last quarter, Mindray and Getinge, so we can connect in our technology, comes into their monitors, up into the cloud, and everybody can see it in Epic and Cerner, what they want to see. It's guidelines, it's industry partnerships, it's key opinion leaders. We're like the winner in this race. We have a lot of KOLs around the world. I like Dr. Aaron Persinger. He made a quote for me just saying, hey, since I introduced this, you know, we're saving $100,000 at my local community hospital. That's predominantly just the cost of lower anesthetic drugs. The fourth pillar of being successful is having the best team in the world. I have a phenomenal commercial team. We know how to do this, and the number of the day is, we have a main competitor in the U.S.
Typically, we always sell like big clinical evaluations. This year we've had a 92% win rate in these evaluations, so we are winning big. Okay, you can't do this without long-term shareholders. My biggest shareholder is, of course, from Lund. It's the Crawford family and the Crawford Foundation. I keep on promising them all the time that we're building the next Gambro, which they were part of, as well as Tetra Pak. I have a number of strong institutional shareholders who are backing this mission. To wrap up, I mean, in the operating room where I am, there's like one major innovation, one major change that happens every 10 years. That's about what healthcare can cope. If you look at like the last 10 years, the last 40 years, for example, capnography came in the 1980s.
You started measuring carbon dioxide that came out of the nose, which was a, you know, a funny technology at the time. Today it's industry standard, it's guidelines. It's been the same thing. Pulse oximetry, everybody questioned it like crazy in the 1980s, and now it's like gold standard everywhere. It is very clear that the type of technology that we are doing and the guidelines is kind of the parameter of the decade. To wrap up, I mean, we're on a fantastic mission, and we're really transforming healthcare and making sure that everybody wakes up to safe surgery. Thank you.
The U.S. is the priority market.
Yeah.
We have a question here then, how, what are your thoughts on other markets?
Yeah, so U.S. is our biggest market, as I said, about three quarters. South Korea is actually our second biggest market now. Just a very technology-driven market, and there's reimbursement partly for our products. Japan is probably number three, and then Germany. U.S. is the biggest because it's a technology leap, and it's guideline-driven. They need to be compliant, and they're afraid of lawsuits, and they want to save money.
That's actually a benefit to you in this case?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. In Europe, Europe is fantastic, but it's like, okay, this costs money in the operating room, but if it saves money over here, you know, you can't make that connection. European healthcare has a little bit to do to kind of figure out, but what I say, the U.S. is more company-driven, saying, okay, if we do this, we save money here and here and here, and that together gives the return.
What is the plan, or how are you scaling operations in the U.S. too, because of course this seems to be a tremendous product that you have. How are you going to keep up when everyone suddenly wants it?
Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. I mean, we have about 25 people in the U.S., so it's a mix of clinicians and salespeople and service, and that together with partners who are helping to drive it, we can scale this a lot. Once it's in there, it just runs by itself. That's the beauty of having these run rate type of, it's almost like a, like the software people call it as a service. I can scale a lot with the team I have already.
As a final question then, not to end on a negative note, what would you say are the biggest, let's say, challenges then to the U.S. market? Because you talked a lot about the good things.
Things that are beyond my managerial control. I can't control the tariffs, and you know, a little bit annoying. I can't control the currency. It's down like 15%. Otherwise, the headwinds, it's more, and then I can't control these big hospital systems. It's a slow process to do capital deals in the U.S., well, everywhere. That can sometimes, I can win something here, and then it takes me 12 months to get the order.
Thank you so much, Philip.
Thank you.