Last week Vicarious Surgical, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup that combines virtual reality with surgical robotics, announced that it closed a $10 million funding round. Gates Frontier led the round with participation from Khosla Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, AME Cloud Ventures and Marc Benioff. 

What they do 

The company said that by using its VR and surgical robotic technology, surgeons are able to perform a minimally invasive surgery via a micro-incision. 

Vicarious Surgical was founded in 2014 by recent MIT graduates Adam Sachs and Sammy Khalifa, as well as Dr. Barry Greene, a bariatric surgeon at Advanced Weight Loss Surgery, according to Linkedin. 

This isn’t the first infusion of money for the startup. In April of 2018 it scored $16.8 million in Series A funding. The investor list from April mirrors the most recent list — with the only change being that Kholsa Ventures led that round and Gates Ventures participated. According to Crunchbase, the company has raised a total of $30 million.

What it is for

The company said the new money will go towards the next phase of growth and developing the commercial product. 

“With an expanded team driving toward their first product, Vicarious Surgical is rapidly achieving their mission of using miniaturized robotics and immersive [VR] to give surgeons improved capabilities,” Dror Berman, founding partner of Innovation Endeavors, said in a statement. “We are excited to continue our commitment to Vicarious Surgical and to the super evolution of surgery.”

Market snapshot 

VR is increasingly being used in the surgical space. Osso VR is a software developed to create a virtual operating room on VR platforms like Oculus Rift/Touch or HTC Vive. The technology was designed to help surgeons practice a procedure before the real event. 

The healthcare space still has many directions it could take with VR. 

“We can see the effective use of [VR] in simulation, in terms of preparation and rehearsal – the challenge here is the cost of scaling as there are tens of thousands of different procedures with nuances in each of them,” Dr. Nadine Hachach-Haram, told HIMSS Media. “And while the full range of the possibilities of artificial intelligence has not yet been realized, theoretically, we know the scale and impact will be significant.”