Uncovr Raises €6M to Revolutionize Surgery with AI

Every year, over 400 million surgical procedures are performed worldwide, and an increasing proportion of these operations are recorded. However, these recordings often remain untapped once the operating room doors close. Uncovr, an innovative startup, is tackling this issue by raising $7 million, approximately €6 million, to develop an automatic analysis platform for surgical videos.

This funding round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Seedcamp, Frst, No Label Ventures, Entrepreneurs First, and several business angels specializing in health and artificial intelligence. Already implemented in some operating rooms in the United States and Europe, Uncovr's technology aims to automatically generate surgical reports and billing codes from surgical videos.

Uncovr seeks to address a major problem: a multi-institutional study of over 1,000 cases across 500 healthcare systems revealed that the majority of surgical reports omit more than 70% of the recommended clinical information. Furthermore, early deployments of the platform showed that 16% of analyzed cases had critical or billable steps missing from the documentation, resulting in an average reimbursement gap of about 10%.

These documentation gaps have significant repercussions on continuity of care, analysis of postoperative complications, and the quality of data available to improve surgical practices. Uncovr's initiative is part of a broader trend of artificial intelligence in healthcare. Following the digitization of medical records and medical imaging, AI is now beginning to directly address the medical act itself.

The technology developed by Uncovr analyzes surgical videos second by second to identify the actions performed, their sequence, events that occurred during the procedure, and decisions made by practitioners. This clinical understanding allows the platform to automatically generate a structured surgical report and the necessary elements for administrative coding.

For investors, surgery today represents a vast reservoir of data that is still largely underutilized, similar to what medical imaging was a decade ago. Major players in surgical robotics, such as Intuitive Surgical with its da Vinci system, already control part of the infrastructure for collecting this data. The battle is now focused on the ability to build datasets to train future surgical assistance systems.

The true value of Uncovr lies in the creation of a large-scale structured surgical database. Just as textual corpora enabled the emergence of large language models, operational data could become a strategic asset for the next generation of medical artificial intelligence.

The founding team of Uncovr is also a significant asset. Alongside Ines Iraki, the company's CEO, is Johann Diep, an engineer trained at ETH Zurich and a former collaborator of the European Space Agency, as well as Professor Eric Vibert, an internationally renowned hepatobiliary surgeon.

In summary, after transforming patient record management and the interpretation of medical images, artificial intelligence is beginning to understand what happens inside the operating room itself. Uncovr's funding round reflects this new stage, set against the backdrop of building data infrastructures for AI-assisted surgery.