Every year, more than 400 million surgical procedures are performed worldwide. A growing proportion of them are filmed in their entirety. However, once the doors of the operating room are closed, most of this information remains unexploited.
It is this paradox that Uncovr is attacking, the startup announces a fundraising of 7 million dollars, or around 6 million euros, led by Index Ventures with the participation of Seedcamp, Frst, No Label Ventures, Entrepreneurs First and several business angels specializing in health and artificial intelligence. Already deployed in operating theaters in the United States and Europe, the company is developing a platform capable of automatically analyzing surgical videos in order to generate operating reports and billing codes.
The problem it seeks to solve is far from anecdotal, according to data cited by the company, a multi-institutional study conducted on more than 1,000 cases in 500 health systems shows that the majority of operative reports omit more than 70% of recommended clinical information. Early deployments of the platform also revealed critical or billable steps missing from documentation in 16% of cases analyzed, with an average reimbursement gap of around 10%.
These documentary gaps have consequences that go far beyond simple hospital administration and, in fact, affect the continuity of care, complicate the analysis of postoperative complications and reduce the quality of data available to improve surgical practices.
Uncovr’s initiative illustrates a deeper evolution of artificial intelligence in health. The first wave of digitization focused on medical records, the second focused on imaging and assisted diagnosis, for two years, a third generation of actors has been automating medical documentation using large language models, now, AI is starting to directly attack the medical act itself.
The technology developed by Uncovr analyzes surgical videos second by second in order to identify the gestures performed, their sequence, the events that occurred during the intervention and the decisions made by the practitioners. From this clinical understanding, the platform automatically generates a structured operating report and the elements necessary for administrative coding.
For many investors, surgery represents today what medical imaging was ten years ago: an immense reservoir of data that is still largely under-exploited.
The subject is all the more strategic as the main players in surgical robotics, starting with Intuitive Surgical and its da Vinci system, already control part of the infrastructure allowing this data to be collected. The battle is no longer just about robots or software. It now concerns the ability to constitute the data sets which will be used to train future surgical assistance systems.
This is likely where the real investment thesis behind Uncovr lies. The automated generation of reports constitutes the first visible application of the platform. But the potential value lies in building a large-scale structured surgical database. Like the textual corpora that enabled the emergence of large language models or the driving data that powered Tesla’s autonomous systems, operational data could become one of the most strategic assets of the next generation of medical artificial intelligence.
This perspective also explains the interest of Index Ventures, the fund is not only financing a hospital productivity tool, but is betting on the emergence of a new layer of infrastructure intended to make surgery measurable, analyzable and exploitable by artificial intelligence systems.
The founding team constitutes another differentiating element. Alongside Ines Iraki, who heads the company, is Johann Diep, an engineer from ETH Zurich who worked on AI systems for the European Space Agency. The project also relies on Professor Eric Vibert, an internationally renowned hepato-biliary surgeon and pioneer in work on surgical data.
After having learned to manage patient files and then to interpret medical images, artificial intelligence is now beginning to understand what is happening inside the operating room itself. The lifting of Uncovr testifies to this new stage. Especially since behind the automation of reports lies a larger issue: the construction of data infrastructures that could power the next generation of surgery assisted by artificial intelligence.
