The concept sounds like science fiction—or perhaps audacious even by Silicon Valley standards. A surgeon in Chicago, coffee still warm on the console, performs a hysterectomy on a patient in Nebraska, some 500 miles west. The scalpel never touches human hands; robotic arms execute each movement with sub-millimeter precision while the doctor manipulates controls from what might as well be another world.
This is the vision Sovato Health is building toward, and on November 4, investors signaled they're willing to fund the journey. The Santa Barbara-based startup closed a Series B round that pushes its total capital raised to $41 million, led by growth-stage investor Beringea. Joining the round: Polaris Partners, Intuitive, GS Ventures, Laerdal Million Lives Fund, Puma Venture Capital, Teladoc Health, and a handful of private backers whose names the company declined to share.
The exact size of the Series B? Sovato isn't saying. Startups rarely do when the number doesn't quite sing.
The Founder Who's Done This Before
If Sovato's ambitions seem outsize, its executive chairman has earned the right to think big. Yulun Wang founded Computer Motion in the 1990s, pioneering the ZEUS and AESOP robotic surgical systems before orchestrating a merger with Intuitive Surgical in 2003—a deal that effectively created today's surgical robotics titan. Years later, he founded InTouch Health, the telemedicine platform Teladoc Health acquired in 2020 for roughly $1.1 billion.
Wang knows the operating room, and he knows how to build infrastructure that scales across hospital systems. Which matters, because Sovato isn't trying to build yet another proprietary surgical robot. There are plenty of those already crowding the market, each with its own learning curve and capital expense.
Instead, the company is developing what it calls a "system-agnostic" platform—software and connectivity tools designed to work across multiple robotic systems, turning existing machines into remote-capable devices. CEO and co-founder Cynthia Perazzo, who previously held leadership roles at healthcare consultancy AVIA and California's Hoag Health, describes the approach as creating the infrastructure layer for an entirely new category: remote robotic surgery at distance.
Founded in 2022, Sovato remains early-stage. Its technology hasn't been evaluated by the FDA. It's not for sale in the United States, not yet.
But the demonstrations have begun.
Preclinical Miles—Thousands of Them
In November 2024, Sovato orchestrated a series of wet-lab studies in partnership with Virtual Incision, City of Hope, and the University of Illinois Chicago. Across 20 procedures, the team logged roughly 40,000 combined surgical miles—an almost absurd metric that underscores how far this technology has strayed from traditional surgery's requirement of physical presence.
Earlier trials involved 500-mile distances between Lincoln, Nebraska, and Chicago, with surgeons performing nephrectomies, hysterectomies, colectomies, and cholecystectomies on cadavers and simulated tissue. Sovato has also partnered with South Korea's LivsMed, working to remote-enable that company's STARK robotic system.
The procedures went smoothly, according to the company. Latency issues—the millisecond delays that could turn a surgeon's movement into a catastrophic error—were manageable. But preclinical is not clinical, and wet labs are not emergency rooms with unpredictable bleeds and panicked nurses.
Still, the symbolism matters. Remote surgery has existed in limited forms for years, mostly involving specialists dialing into procedures at nearby facilities. Sovato is proposing something more radical: true distance surgery that could, in theory, allow a surgeon in New York to operate on a patient in rural Montana without boarding a plane or spending a night away from home.
The Math Behind the Mission
Sovato's timing, at least on paper, looks deliberate. The surgical robotics market is projected to hit $23.13 billion by 2030, expanding at a 12.4% compound annual growth rate as hospitals adopt automation and precision tools. Meanwhile, the Association of American Medical Colleges forecasts a shortage of between 15,800 and 30,200 surgical specialists in the U.S. by 2034—a gap that will hit rural and underserved communities hardest.
Remote surgery won't solve that shortage entirely. But it could redistribute expertise more efficiently, allowing elite surgeons to operate across multiple sites without the friction of travel. A hepatobiliary specialist in Boston could, theoretically, perform a complex liver resection in Boise on Tuesday and another in Tulsa on Thursday.
"We are confident in Sovato's leadership position as the only platform creating the market for remote surgery and procedure programs," said Michael Gross, a managing partner at Beringea who now sits on Sovato's board, in a statement accompanying the funding announcement. The phrasing—"creating the market"—is revealing. This isn't a land grab in an established category. It's an attempt to invent one.
What Comes Next
Sovato plans to deploy the fresh capital toward accelerating platform development and deepening partnerships with surgical robotics manufacturers, healthcare systems, and what the company vaguely terms "ecosystem collaborators." The startup currently employs between 11 and 50 people, according to company disclosures, and holds 17 U.S. patents with additional international filings in progress.
The regulatory path forward remains opaque. The FDA has approved remote robotic procedures in limited contexts, but a platform designed to work across multiple systems and vast distances will face scrutiny—questions about fail-safes, liability, connectivity standards, and what happens when a network hiccups mid-incision.
Perhaps more complicated: convincing hospitals to adopt a technology that, however promising, asks patients to trust a surgeon they may never meet in person. Medicine remains a profession built on presence, on the reassurance of a doctor's hand on your shoulder before anesthesia takes hold.
Sovato is betting that presence, in the end, is less important than access. That a patient in a small-town hospital would rather have a world-class surgeon operating remotely than a less experienced one operating in the room. It's a wager worth $41 million, at least for now.
Whether it scales beyond the lab—that's the experiment still unfolding.
