Intuitive Ventures

Pushing the envelope in MedTech with emerging technologies

Next-gen Medical Devices

Neocis is developing technology for dental surgery using advanced robotics. It manufactures and markets Yomi, the first robotic surgical system in dentistry cleared by the FDA. Yomi is a computerized robotic navigational system designed to assist in the planning and execution phases of dental implant surgery. This robotic assistance helps reduce procedure time, pain, recovery time, and the chances of complications, offering significant benefits to dentists and patients undergoing dental implant surgery.The advanced platform has received 16 FDA clearances, including full-arch rehabilitation and guided bone reduction procedures.Key customers and partnershipsNeocis primarily provides its solutions to dental clinics and surgical centers. As of January 2024, over 40,000 dental implants were placed using the Yomi system and new implants are placed robotically approximately every six minutes. Notable dentist practices using the Yomi system include Artaza Dental and Veranda Dentistry.

Capstan Medical, established in 2020, is a medical technology company dedicated to transforming the treatment of heart valve disease. The company is developing a suite of next-generation heart valve implants, coupled with an innovative catheter-based robotic delivery platform. This groundbreaking technology aims to provide a minimally invasive alternative to traditional open-heart surgery for conditions such as mitral and tricuspid valve disorders.
Capstan Medical's approach involves a catheter-based treatment that addresses heart valve disease through a small incision in the groin, eliminating the need for stopping the heart or opening the chest, as required in open-heart surgery. This technique significantly reduces recovery times from months to weeks and makes the procedure accessible even for critically ill patients. As of January 2024, less than 2% of the over 5 million eligible patients are currently receiving treatment, leaving a rapidly growing patient population with limited options.
Capstan Medical's technology integrates surgical robotics with catheter-based technology and next-generation implants, pioneering a patient-optimized approach to heart valve repair and replacement. The company's innovative delivery system offers precise and reliable placement of the heart valve implant, minimizing the risk of complications associated with open-heart surgeries.
As of August 2023, the company secured an oversubscribed USD 31.4 million Series B investment led by Eclipse, with additional participation from Intuitive Ventures and Puma Venture Capital. This funding will enable Capstan Medical to expand its engineering, clinical development, and operations teams, advancing the technology toward the next stage of development and first human use.
Led by CEO Maggie Nixon, a two-decade veteran from Intuitive Surgical, and co-founder and CTO Dan Wallace, a seasoned robotics engineer, Capstan Medical is poised to address the rising need for minimally invasive solutions in the treatment of heart valve disease.

Artificial intelligence is identifying and testing new therapies faster than ever.

AI Drug Discovery

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 Flywheel operates a cloud-based medical research data management and collaboration platform which captures and curates clinical data from multiple sources such as imaging, electronic health records (EHRs), digital pathology and omics, to enable further processing and accelerate the drug discovery and development process. Flywheel's cloud platform automates tasks such as handling data and allows scientists to focus on new discoveries. It also offers tools for analyzing and visualizing data and can work with other AI and machine-learning platforms.
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 The company&rsquo;s services are targeted at companies in life sciences, clinical research, imaging research, and AI health development markets. Research institutions such as Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan, and Massachusetts General Hospital, and Boston Children&rsquo;s Hospital, and Swiss pharma giant Roche and its member company Genentech (
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/6854">
 November 2021
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 ) are among its clientele.
 
 
 In 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/24331">
 November 2023
 </a>
 , the company collaborated with Microsoft and NVIDIA to launch a SaaS data management solution on Miscrosoft Azure.
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 The company raised USD 54 million In a Series D funding round in June 2023 led by Novalis LifeSciences and NVentures. The proceeds were earmarked to expand its reach into new markets and geographies, especially Europe. 
 
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New data privacy regulations have opened up space for a new wave of compliance-focused startups.

Digital Privacy Tools

Dasera is developing a data governance platform that enables enterprises to control access to their data, along with data discovery and classification tools and compliance vulnerability and violations management. The company’s platform helps automate privacy compliance and data security, incorporating capabilities such as data security posture management (DSPM), comprehensive data visibility, data access governance (DAG), and data detection and response (DDR).Dasera leverages natural language understanding (NLU) and machine learning (ML) to identify and classify data across an organization’s infrastructure, applications, and data stores to surface personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive data to enable data management and compliance with regulatory requirements. The platform also continuously monitors enterprise data for misconfigurations, excessive access privilege, data location, and data usage to enable detection and remediation of compliance issues.Key customers and partnershipsAs of September 2024, Dasera’s customers included Omada, Unity, Afterpay, Informatica, and Inspectiv.Dasera announced an integration with Cisco’s cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) Panoptica to provide data protection for critical assets, prioritize critical vulnerabilities, and fortify resilience.

AI-based solutions for evolving digital threats

Next-gen Cybersecurity

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 MedCrypt is a Y Combinator incubated medical device startup that provides proactive cybersecurity solutions to secure connected medical devices such as glucose monitors, surgical robots, insulin pumps, heart rate monitors, AI-based radiology tools, and autonomous robots from cyber attacks. The platform provides cryptographic communication, behavior monitoring, and vulnerability monitoring and management to secure these devices. It ensures that devices act only according to instructions from trusted sources and provides an early warning system against intrusions with an event monitoring system that detects anomalous behavior. The company provides solutions to monitor devices in the field, secure existing and new devices, and monitor software bill of materials (SBOM) for known vulnerabilities.
 
 
 MedCrypt-enabled devices transmit healthcare-specific behavior metadata to Canary, an event monitoring system, which allows users to monitor and assess the behavior of devices in the field to detect security events, generating alerts to abnormal behavior in real time. Ghost is a secure overlay agent that enables encryption on existing devices. Guardian is an embedded library that provides cryptography functions such as signature verification and data encryption via an API/ABI. This allows users to sign code, data, instructions, configurations, and more and verify data structures before loading into an active device, whilst ensuring privacy. Heimdall, which is a vulnerability management tool, imports SBOMs and monitors for vulnerabilities.
 
 
 MedCrypt has an employee headcount of more than 20. As of November 2022, the company had plans to go public.
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 In 2022, MedCrypt partnered with 18 new medical device manufacturers and it served seven of the top 10 medical device manufacturers, as of January 2023. Notable customers include Tenac.io and Qlife.
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 In November 2022, the company 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/14188">
 raised USD 25 million 
 </a>
 in a Series B funding round, co-led by Intuitive Ventures and Johnson &amp; Johnson Innovation. The funds were utilized to expand its cryptography, behavior monitoring, and vulnerability inventory products across different types of medical devices and to grow its engineering team.
 
 
 In January 2023, the company 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/15956">
 raised an undisclosed sum
 </a>
 as an extension to its Series B funding round from Dexcom Ventures. The funds were utilized to grow its engineering team.
 
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Automation in clinical diagnostics to improve speed and accuracy in patient diagnosis and treatment.

Clinical Decision Support Systems

Optellum is a commercial-stage lung health company that provides an artificial intelligence (AI) decision-support software platform called Virtual Nodule Clinic. This breakthrough technology assists physicians in the early diagnosis and optimal treatment of lung cancer. The Virtual Nodule Clinic integrates a clinically validated Lung Cancer Prediction (LCP) score based on imaging AI or "Radiomics" to identify and track at-risk patients who present suspicious lung nodules that may or may not be cancerous. By enabling early intervention, the software aims to get patients treated before the disease metastasizes, thereby increasing lung cancer survival rates.
Lung cancer has the highest mortality rate of all cancers, with the current five-year survival rate at only 20%. However, the survival rate for small tumors treated at Stage IA is up to 90%, highlighting the critical need for early diagnosis and treatment. Optellum's technology has the potential to improve clinical care coordination and decisions by distinguishing benign from malignant nodules and minimizing invasive procedures such as biopsies on benign lesions.
In March 2022, Optellum attained CE marking for its Virtual Nodule Clinic, allowing its use in the European Union (EU) and the UK (UK). This followed the company's FDA 510(k) clearance in early 2021 as the first AI-assisted diagnosis application for lung cancer in the US. In June 2022, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) established a national payment rate for Optellum's Lung Cancer Prediction technology under the New Technology Ambulatory Payment Classification, facilitating reimbursement for the use of this innovative technology with Medicare patients.
Optellum's Virtual Nodule Clinic is currently being piloted at ten NHS hospitals as part of the DOLCE study, a landmark research project aimed at evaluating the technology's potential to save costs by reducing the need for repeat CT scans. The company is also the lead industrial partner in the UK's DART consortium, working with NHS England's Targeted Lung Health Check program to provide lung cancer screening to approximately 600,000 eligible people.
In September 2022, Optellum raised USD 14 million in a Series A funding round led by Mercia, with additional investors including Intuitive Ventures and Black Opal Ventures. This funding will support the company's commercial expansion, research and development efforts, and the integration of its platform with liquid biopsies, robotics, and drug therapies to enable personalized therapy decisions.
Optellum has formed strategic collaborations with GE healthcare and the Lung Cancer Initiative at Johnson & Johnson to accelerate the clinical deployment and advancement of its platform.
In August 2022, Optellum was acquired by an undisclosed company.

Transforming neurological care with innovation

Neurostimulation Tech

Amber Therapeutics' lead product is Amber-UI, a fully implantable, closed-loop bioelectrical therapy targeting the treatment of mixed urinary incontinence (MUI) in women. The Amber-UI therapy can access and target the pudendal nerve, which directly controls continence, through a minimally invasive surgical procedure. Leveraging closed-loop neuromodulation concepts, Amber-UI can directly regulate the urge to void the bladder (urge incontinence) and augment resistance to urine leakage caused by activities like coughing or lifting (stress incontinence), thereby restoring normal bladder function.
In late 2022, Amber Therapeutics initiated the AURA-2 (Augmenting Urinary Reflex Activity) first-in-human study to evaluate Amber-UI's safety and pilot efficacy in 15 women. As of January 2023, three participants had been safely implanted with the Amber-UI system, with the adaptive algorithm activated and running continuously in a home setting. Early indications confirmed the feasibility of the surgical procedure and therapy. The study is expected to conclude by the end of 2023, with learnings used to optimize the Amber-UI therapy for a pivotal trial.
In September 2023, Amber Therapeutics acquired Bioinduction Limited and its Picostim DyNeuMo neuromodulation platform, which is used to deliver the Amber-UI therapy. This acquisition transformed Amber into a vertically integrated designer, developer, and manufacturer of Class III Active implantable systems, supporting the company's accelerated effort to bring Amber-UI into a pivotal trial in the US and eventual global commercialization.
In June 2024, Amber Therapeutics closed a USD 100 million Series A financing round led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from F-Prime Capital, Lightstone Ventures, Intuitive Ventures, and existing investors Oxford Science Enterprises and 8VC. The funds will support the development of Amber-UI through pilot studies in Europe and a pivotal trial in the US, aiming for regulatory approval.
Amber Therapeutics was spun out from the University of Oxford in 2021 and is backed by Oxford Science Enterprises, 8VC, and a UKRI Biomedical Catalyst grant.

XII Medical is a medical device developer company. It develops a minimally invasive outpatient technology for the treatment of obstructive sleep apnea.

Endogenex develops an endoscopic procedure to help patients with type 2 diabetes regain control of their blood glucose levels. Established in 2017, Endogenex has developed a novel therapy that utilizes pulsed electric fields to promote regeneration of the duodenal mucosa for improvement in glycemic control in patients with T2D.

Amber Therapeutics develops the next-generation of bioelectrical therapies that can sense and adapt as well as stimulate, with the potential to radically improve clinical outcomes in patients with functional disorders of the peripheral nervous system.

Capstan Medical is creating minimally invasive technologies to treat heart valve disorders.

SURGE Therapeutics seeks to dramatically improve cancer patient survival by disrupting cancer immunotherapy is deployed. The company provides an injectable biodegradable hydrogel that allows for the prolonged, localized release of most cancer immunotherapy on the website of surgical tumor resection by focusing the dose at the right place and right time.

Flywheel is a data management and analysis platform built specifically for scientists and the researcher's workflow.  They empower research momentum by focusing on data and medical image capture, content management, scientific computation, and collaboration.  With reproducible research in mind, they combine open-source methods from top universities, a modern web user interface, and an extensible compute engine based on containerization technology. The result is a software platform to accelerate discovery and help researchers do science, not IT. Flywheel accelerates new scientific discoveries in life-science, biotech, and academic imaging research through cloud-scale collaboration. As a result, imaging researchers are able to avoid innovation bottlenecks, and accelerate discovery by doing more science, and less IT.

Dasera is a Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) platform that automates security and governance controls across structured and unstructured data in your cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments.  It empowers organizations to manage risk across their entire data lifecycle, from creation to deletion, ensuring compliance with evolving data privacy regulations.

MedCrypt is a medical device company that provides data security as a service to medical device OEMs. From medical imaging device to implantable devices like pacemakers, MedCrypt ensures that devices act only on instructions from trusted sources. It brings security features to medical devices, from pacemakers to surgical robots, in a few lines of code. The company enables engineers to implement these security features properly as quickly as possible, allowing them to get back to designing life-changing clinical features. MedCrypt was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Encinitas, California, United States.

Neocis develops robot-assisted dental implant surgery with the aim of transforming dental surgery using advanced robotics.  The company is the developer and manufacturer of Yomi, a robotic device for dental surgery commercially available in the USA and was cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The company created Yomi aiming to focus on enhancing dental surgeons’ capabilities and advancing patient care through the latest technology. Neocis operates with dental surgeons to understand the needs with the focus on overcoming surgical and treatment challenges.  Neocis was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in Miami, Florida.

Optellum develops an imaging biomarker for smart lung cancer detection.  Optellum’s vision is to redefine cancer care, by enabling every clinician, in every hospital, to manage their patients in the optimal way.   They do that by providing end-end IT platform for personalized early diagnosis and therapy, based on the collective experience of thousands of doctors pooled by machine learning applied to vast patient datasets.  Their first suite of products targets management of patients at high risk of developing lung cancer – the world’s deadliest and commonest cancer – from early diagnosis through to treatment. Optellum comprises a team of award-winning medical imaging software, AI, and clinical experts who met at Oxford’s world-renowned computer vision lab. Between us, they have track records of bringing innovation to market through over 10 start-up companies, resulting already in 5 trade-sales and one IPO.  They are backed by an Advisory Board comprising world-leading clinicians and experts in deep learning ; and Oxford's most prominent investors. They are building up their product development team – join their fight against cancer, working together with former software engineers from top technology companies (Amazon, Facebook, Redhat) and veterans of medical imaging startups (e.g. Mirada Solutions – acquired by Siemens).

KelaHealth Surgical Intelligence Platform delivers patient-specific predictive insights and recommended interventions at key decision points to improve surgical care quality and clinical operations. It is creating a learning ecosystem to improve surgical care outcomes.

Intuitive Ventures focuses on early-stage start-ups and takes a long-term outlook to support companies to reach their major milestones. Through its inaugural $100 million funds and with leadership combining decades of investing and operational experience, the team cultivates strategic resources to drive financial returns and accelerate the future of minimally invasive care. Intuitive Ventures has already started deploying capital and is actively building its portfolio.

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