When surgeons finish a procedure and peel off their gloves, the real work sometimes begins: dictating operative notes, wrangling procedure codes, documenting every billable step. It's tedious, error-prone, and—according to one New York-Paris startup that just surfaced from stealth—quietly costing hospitals millions in missed reimbursements.
Uncovr, which announced itself to the world in June, raised $7 million in seed funding to build AI that watches surgery unfold in real time, then auto-generates the paperwork. The pitch is clinical efficiency meets revenue recovery, and it attracted Index Ventures to lead the round—alongside a roster of backers that includes Seedcamp, Frst, No Label Ventures, Entrepreneurs First, and Sequoia's Scout program.
Among the angels: Jean Nehme, who founded Digital Surgery before selling it to Medtronic, and Othman Laraki, currently steering Color Health. Charlie Songhurst also joined.
An AI Scribe for the Operating Room
What Uncovr has built, essentially, is a surgical scribe—one that runs on computer vision rather than human transcription. As a surgeon works through a cholecystectomy or hernia repair, the company's software analyzes video from the endoscope or overhead camera, parsing anatomy, identifying procedural steps, flagging techniques. By the time the patient is wheeled to recovery, a draft operative report and coding suggestions are waiting for review.
The company calls this "structured clinical intelligence," and the architecture, according to Uncovr, strips identifying information on-device before anything leaves the OR. End-to-end encryption, no protected health information in the cloud, mandatory clinician sign-off before submission. It's the sort of privacy scaffolding you'd expect in 2026, given how skittish hospitals remain about AI handling patient data.
Uncovr's ambition extends beyond documentation drudgery. The company frames itself as building the "system of record" for surgery—a grand claim in a field where fragmented EHRs and inconsistent charting have been the norm for decades.
The Reimbursement Gap No One Tracks
The startup's most eyebrow-raising assertion involves money left on the table. According to company-stated figures from early deployments, Uncovr found missed billable steps in roughly 16% of cases analyzed, translating to reimbursement gaps hovering around 10%.
Those numbers come from the company's own pipeline—not an independent audit—so the usual caveats apply. Still, the premise isn't far-fetched. A sizable study published in Annals of Surgery Open in April 2024 examined over a thousand ventral hernia repair reports across more than 500 HCA Healthcare facilities. Only about a third were deemed "highly detailed," and sloppy documentation correlated with worse patient outcomes: more infections, more readmissions, more reoperations.
If surgeons aren't capturing clinical nuance in their notes, they're probably not capturing every billable nuance either. Uncovr is betting hospitals will pay to close that gap.
Who's Behind It
Ines Iraki, co-founder and CEO, splits her time between New York and Paris. Her background threads through HEC Paris and Sciences Po—business and policy pedigree, not clinical. Johann Diep, the CTO, brings a different flavor of credentials: he previously built AI and computer vision systems for the UK Ministry of Defence, the Swiss Armed Forces, and the European Space Agency. Serious work, in other words, before pivoting to operating rooms.
The medical anchor is Prof. Eric Vibert, a hepatobiliary and liver transplant surgeon at AP-HP's Paul-Brousse Hospital outside Paris. He serves as medical co-founder and director, the clinician counterweight to the technologists.
Founded in 2025, Uncovr was in active hiring mode as of mid-2026, with Iraki mentioning on social media in May that the team had doubled in three months. Small, but moving.
Building Community Before Market Share
Uncovr says it has a pipeline of 400 operating rooms and claims to have analyzed thousands of hours of surgical video across what it describes as "leading hospitals in the US and Europe." Specific health system names? The company hasn't shared them publicly.
What it has done is invest in face time with surgeons. In April, Uncovr hosted a "Surgical AI Circle" dinner at the SAGES conference in Tampa, gathering 45 surgical leaders from 38 top U.S. health systems—more networking than sales pitch, perhaps, but the kind of groundwork that matters when you're asking hospitals to trust your algorithms with procedural documentation. The company also sponsored the New York Surgical Society Tripartite Meeting in May.
It's a crowded space to walk into. Theator, another surgical AI player, had raised $39.5 million through its Series A by 2022. Caresyntax announced $180 million in financing in 2024. Both have been at this longer, with more capital and more deployed systems.
But the broader surgical AI market—documentation, analytics, quality improvement—continues to pull serious venture interest. Hospitals are hunting for ways to improve both clinical rigor and revenue capture, and Uncovr is making the case that real-time video analysis can deliver both at once.
Whether that pitch scales beyond early pilots is the question that $7 million is meant to answer.
