Digital surgery startup Activ Surgical announced Thursday it closed on a $45 million funding round. The Series B came courtesy of a baker’s dozen investors, led by Cota Capital, and has brought the Boston-based company’s total funding raised to $77 million.
Founded in 2017, Activ Surgical is in the midst of building a suite of tools that allow for autonomous and collaborative surgery thanks to the integration of computer vision, artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented reality and robotics. The first of those tools is ActivSight, which can be hooked up to any endoscope and white light camera system to help surgeons see otherwise invisible things during surgery, like blood flow through microscopic vessels inside tissue. The hardware received FDA 510(k) clearance in April.
Activ Surgical also recently issued its first U.S. patent for ActivSight, and completed its first-in-human clinical trials. Going forward, the company plans to use this fresh funding to support the commercialization of its ActivInsights suite, particularly its first “insight” — an AR-based overlay that displays tissue perfusion in real time without the use of traditional dyes. The money will also be used to pursue a CE mark approval in Europe to begin the global rollout of ActivInsights.
This latest round is coming at a “critical” time for Activ Surgical, as CEO Todd Usen put it in a statement, and a particularly busy time for the surgery and medtech space in general. Earlier this month, Caresyntax, another Boston-area company that uses AI to help surgeons, announced it raised $30 million — an extension of the $100 million Series C it closed in April that brought the round’s total to $130 million. That same week, Vicarious Surgical, a Bill Gates-based startup that’s bringing virtual reality and robotics to surgery, announced it was going public through a SPAC deal valuing it at more than $1 billion.
Meanwhile, Bobby Yazdani, a founding partner at Cota Capital who will be joining Activ Surgical’s board of directors, says the startup has the potential to “revolutionize the operating room as we know it.”
“The company’s cutting-edge product portfolio, coupled with its talented and experienced leadership team and staff, has the potential to deliver world class surgery, regardless of geography or economic status, while helping to save lives and reduce medical complications,” Yazdani said in a statement. “We are thrilled to be the lead investor on this Series B fundraise and are excited about what the future holds for the company and its technology.”
