Wants to watch you being cut open

California-based startup Theator has raised $15.5 million in a Series A funding round.

The company uses artificial intelligence and computer vision to improve the efficiency and safety of surgical procedures.

Theator does not rely on robots to perform surgery. Instead, its Surgical Intelligence platform watches the procedures, providing annotations and analytics.

This could include tracking pus spillage, establishing whether the patient had prior surgery, and finding out how many intraoperative adverse events they had.

Rating surgeries using AI

Theator’s cloud platform offers access to some 400,000 minutes of surgery footage, allowing surgeons to review similar operations ahead of their own.

Following the procedure, surgeons are provided with an analysis of their performance and decisions. Department heads can track these reports, using KPIs and rankings. In the future, Theator plans to use AI to spot wider trends in its data pool.

“Intraoperative video footage, and by extension video-based analyses, is on the core of surgical innovation,” Dr. Tamir Wolf, co-founder and CEO at Theator, said.

“Surgeons, medical methods and forward-thinking skilled societies have all come to understand its potential worth in enhancing surgical care and affected person security. Theator is leveraging… AI-based analyses of surgical information to construct a surgical future [where the] finest practices are broadly understood, and surgical decision-making is democratized.”

Founded in 2018 by Wolf and Dotan Asselmann, the company has expanded from its home base in Palo Alto and now operates an R&D site in Tel Aviv.

Its latest fundraising round was led by Insight Partners, joined by new investor Blumberg Capital, and supported by all existing investors including NFX, StageOne Ventures, KdT Ventures, and iAngels.

Also contributing funds were individual investors, including Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and CEO of DNA database firm 23andMe; former Netflix chief product officer Neil Hunt; and Zebra Medical Vision’s co-founder Eyal Gura.

The funds will be spent on growing Theator’s R&D team, expand its commercial operations, and forge new partnerships with healthcare providers in the US.