Increasing Investment in Health Robotics is a Good Sign

Investment in Robotics has seen an incrreasing trend despite the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is probably an overall positive sign of the health of robotics investing also.

Medical robotics continues to be a big thing. What is amazing about surgical robots is how long they have actually been in practice. The earliest date back to the mid-80s, for things like orthopedic surgeries. As for more mainstream usage, Intuitive’s da Vinci has been around for more than 20 years. At last count, there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 of these devices deployed worldwide.

Fittingly, Intuitive co-founder Frederic Moll is among the new advisers for ForSight Robotics. The Israeli startup just raised US$ 10 million in what it calls a "mega-seed round" for its eye surgery platform. Ophthalmological procedures, for what should be obvious reasons, have even less room for error than most surgeries.

The company says it can "democratize" the difficult procedure across different geographies – particularly those where access to professionals may be lacking. Per numbers from the British Journal of Ophthalmology, there are around 3.7 qualified surgeons per million citizens in developing countries. The hope is that getting machines like these in more medical facilities could help level the playing field to some degree.