What You Should Know:
– Israeli-based ForSight Robotics, the pioneer in ophthalmic robotic surgery raises $55M in Series A funding to advance the world’s first surgical platform for fully robotic cataract surgery: ORYOM. The round was led by The Adani Group with existing investors Eclipse Ventures and Mithril Capital. A number of new investors, including Provenio Capital, Precision Capital, Reiya Ventures, the Ljungstrom family office, and other prominent private investors also joined the round.
– ForSight’s flagship robotic platform will increase accessibility to ophthalmic surgery procedures worldwide and ultimately transform the future of eye surgery.
Reimagining Eye Care Surgery
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 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.”
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.
