YOKNEAM, ISRAEL — ForSight Robotics, a company focusing on ophthalmic robotic surgery, has completed a $55 million Series A round.
The funding will advance what the company calls “the world’s first surgical platform for fully robotic cataract surgery,” named Oryom. ForSight’s flagship robotic platform “will increase accessibility to ophthalmic surgery procedures worldwide and ultimately, transform the future of eye surgery,” according to a press release.
The Adani Group led the funding round alongside existing investors Eclipse Ventures and Mithril Capital. New investors, including Provenio Capital, Precision Capital, Reiya Ventures, the Ljungstrom family office and other private investors also joined the round.
Following an initial $10 million mega-seed round last year, ForSight “has advanced its technological capabilities and doubled in size,” according to the release. The platform has been used in multiple cataract procedures on an animal eye model by ophthalmic surgeons.
More from the release:
ForSight plans to bridge the worldwide gap in the accessibility to eye surgery, and help over one billion people who suffer from preventable vision impairment and eye diseases. ForSight’s first procedure is cataract surgery, the most common surgical procedure with approximately 28M procedures worldwide per year. According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, there are over 25M Americans who suffer from cataract and hundreds of millions of cataract patients around the world.
ORYOM – which means “daylight” in Hebrew – leverages cutting-edge technologies in microsurgical robotics, computer visualization, and machine learning. The platform will automate the complex subtleties of ophthalmic surgery to treat the diseases underlying preventable blindness with an intuitive platform. It will raise the bar for high quality procedures with superhuman submillimeter accuracy – 10 times more accurate than the human hand – delivering ultimate consistency, for extremely safe surgeries with optimal refractive outcomes.
“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 ForSight Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Dr. Daniel Glozman. “Our goal is to democratize this highly sophisticated procedure, enabling patients around the world to easily access the treatment that can restore their vision.”
Timely ophthalmic microsurgery can prevent many of the leading causes of blindness. However ophthalmic surgery is intricate and complex, requires years to master and there is a shortage of skilled ophthalmic surgeons. 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.
An estimated 2.2 billion people worldwide have a vision impairment. This burden is estimated to cost $3 trillion annually in lost productivity, healthcare, and social care, according to a study by the Global Public Health Journal.
ForSight ORYOM is being developed by leading robotic experts and prominent ophthalmic surgeons. These include Dr. Fred Moll and Mr. Rony Abovitz as part of the company’s strategic board ,and Prof. Moshe Shoham, ForSight co-founder and chief scientific officer. Together they have formed some of the most successful medical robotic companies worldwide, such as Intuitive Surgical, Mako Surgical, and Mazor Robotics. The company has a prestigious clinical advisory board which includes Dr. David Chang, Prof. Boris Malyugin, Dr. Elizabeth Yeu, Dr. Sam Garg, Dr. Vance Thompson and Dr. Modi Naftali.
The funding will be used to accelerate the development of the ForSight’s ORYOM platform in clinical trials. The company is working on other preventable ophthalmic diseases that can benefit from the accuracy of a robotics platform and advanced visualization such as retinal diseases and glaucoma among others.
“We are delighted for the opportunity to invest in ForSight, a company that is transforming the medical landscape with its offering,” said Jeet Adani, Vice President, Group Finance, Adani Group. “We see this as a strategic investment with synergies as part of our healthcare business ambitions. ForSight’s success will help millions of people around the world see and live better.”
Dr. Joseph Nathan, ForSight Robotics Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer adds that the platform ForSight is building is benefiting from great technological advancement that has happened in the last several years. “With the advancement of computing power, AI, and miniature mechanics, better access to healthcare will be made possible,” he said. “Our goal is to work with industry and surgeons across different geographies in order to benefit as many vision-impaired patients as possible.”
In addition to earlier financing, ForSight has been awarded several grants from the Israel Innovation Authority’s Companies Incentive Program and has built a top-notch executive team to lead mechanical engineering, computer vision, product design and software development. The company is expanding its technical team, and is actively hiring highly skilled, impact-driven engineers across the mechanical, software and hardware fields.
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