Surgical startup Theater raises $15.5m Series A round to Scale its AI platform

Theator, the Surgical Intelligence platform leveraging AI and computer vision to improve surgeon performance, announced it raised $15.5 million in an oversubscribed Series A round led by Insight Partners, joined by new investor Blumberg Capital, and supported by all existing investors including NFX, StageOne Ventures, KdT Ventures, and iAngels.

Several notable individual investors, including 23andMe's Co-founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki, former Netflix Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt, and Zebra Medical Vision's Co-founder Eyal Gura, also participated in the round. The round will be used by Theator to scale its commercial operations and partnerships with U.S. providers, grow its R&D team and cement its status as a world-leading provider of AI-powered Surgical Intelligence solutions. Theator has raised a total of $18.5 million to date.

Variability and disparity – the colloquial notion that "where you live, determines if you live," – have become prevalent in surgery. In the U.S., black children are three times as likely as white children to die within a month of surgery. Worldwide, an estimated 5 billion people lack access to safe surgical care. Surgeons' efforts to overcome these gross inequalities are stunted by an antiquated surgical apprenticeship model that has placed residents and surgeons in a black box: with knowledge and scope of practice that is greatly limited to their own personal training and surgical experiences. The surgical field's shortcomings have rendered it ripe for innovative technological solutions which make sophisticated post-operative insights accessible for practitioners across all geographies and demographics.

Theator's AI-powered platform is based on smart annotation and cutting edge video analytics technology, which extracts and annotates key moments from surgical procedures, enabling surgeons to review operations and glean detailed insights within minutes. By identifying the most pivotal surgical steps, events, milestones, and ultimately decisions, Theator's technology streamlines the pre-operative preparation and post-operative review and assessment process, significantly increasing surgeons' performance, efficiency, and productivity.

Tamir Wolf, CEO and Co-founder, Theator: "Intraoperative video footage, and by extension video-based analyses, is at the core of surgical innovation. Surgeons, medical systems and forward-thinking professional societies have all come to realize its potential value in enhancing surgical care and patient safety. Thanks to support from our new and existing investors, Theator is leveraging routine video capture and AI-based analyses of surgical data to build a surgical future where best practices are more widely understood, and surgical decision-making is democratized."

To date, over a dozen medical centers have contributed to Theator's comprehensive surgical video dataset - which is one of the largest in the world - containing more than 400,000 minutes of curated surgical video encompassing over 80,000 intraoperative moments. Theator's platform translates this video data into actionable feedback which surgeons can use to enhance performance.

Jeff Horing, Co-founder and Managing Director, Insight Partners: "Theator is at the forefront of game-changing surgical field advances, and we are thrilled to support such an exciting company as it strengthens its market foothold. The company has a proven track record of applying its world-class AI and computer vision expertise to enhance surgery, aiming to create a win-win scenario in which patients, hospitals, surgeons, and insurers all benefit, and we look forward to witnessing the company's continued growth and development as it continues to lead the world of video analytics in surgery."

Yasmin Lukatz, Executive Director at ICON, a non-profit organization whose goal is to connect innovative startups with the Silicon Valley ecosystem, played a significant role in boosting Theator's profile among potential investors.

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