Where top VCs are investing in medical and surgical robotics
The medical and healthcare categories have been leading robotic innovation for decades. Look no further than Intuitive Surgical, whose da Vinci robot has been performing surgery since it received FDA clearance in the early 2000s. These days, the SRI spinoff is currently valued at more than $60 billion.
There's a lot of money to be made for established companies and still areas to be explored for young startups, both on and off the operating table. The venture community has been betting big on companies developing everything from new surgical robots, assistive robots for medical facilities, robotic medical aid devices or otherwise.
Medical device and robotics startups raised roughly 600-700 rounds of venture capital in 2019, according to data from Pitchbook and Crunchbase, with most deals occurring at the early stage (over 25% of rounds occurred at the seed stage). With our 2020 Robotics+AI sessions event now just one week away, we're diving back into another robotics sub-sector to see where robotics VCs are actually writing checks.
Just as we did with warehouse robotics last week and construction robotics the week before, we asked four leading VCs who are actively investing in medical and surgical robotics to share what's exciting them most and where they see opportunity in the sector:
- Rohit Sharma, True Ventures
- Duncan Turner, SOSV & HAX
- Peter Hebert, Lux Capital
- Haomiao Huang, Kleiner Perkins
Which trends are you most excited about in surgical/medical robotics from an investing perspective?