Worldwide, more than a billion people suffer from vision impairment and entirely avoidable blindness. Cataracts — and the surgery to correct them — is one of the most common surgical procedures in the world, with more than 28 million performed worldwide, every year. The problem is, even though the surgery is relatively simple, there aren’t enough surgeons, and not enough money to pay those surgeons, especially in developing countries. ForSight Robotics wants to address that issue and just raised a $55 million Series A to continue develop its surgery robots. The round comes around 18 months after its seed round.
The surgery robot platform is called Oryom, which means “daylight” in Hebrew. It leverages cutting-edge technologies (pun intended) in microsurgical robotics, computer vision and machine learning. The platform aims to automate ophthalmic surgeries that treat diseases underlying preventable blindness. With the power of robotics on its side, the company claims to be 10 times more accurate than the human hand.
“We are pleased to be able to advance our technology with this investment to bring robotics into the world of ophthalmic surgery to help millions of patients who have to wait unnecessarily for procedures while their eyesight deteriorates,” says Daniel Glozman, ForSight CEO and co-founder. “Our goal is to democratize this highly sophisticated procedure, enabling patients around the world to easily access the treatment that can restore their vision.”
According to the British Journal of Ophthalmology, affluent nations have 72 eye surgeons per million people, while low-income countries average only 3.7 per million. The surgeries could prevent many of the leading causes of blindness. The freshly raised funding will be used to accelerate the development of ForSight’s platform in clinical trials, with the ultimate goal of benefiting as many patients as possible. The company is expanding its technical team, and shares that it is actively hiring skilled, impact-driven engineers across the mechanical, software and hardware fields.