Angelini Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Angelini Industries, has announced its participation in a £17 million Series A funding round for Hypervision Surgical, a pioneer in real-time hyperspectral imaging for surgery.
The funding round, led by Heal Capital with participation from Angelini Ventures, IP Group and Daycrest, aims to accelerate the commercial roll-out of Hypervision’s Hyperspectral Intelligence platform, expanding its clinical adoption and transforming the company’s next-generation hyperspectral sensing technology – co-developed with Imec, a developer of semiconductor and spectral sensing technologies – into a scalable, cloud-enabled platform for AI-assisted surgery. The system detects information in spectra invisible to the human eye and converts it, using artificial intelligence algorithms, into real-time quantitative indicators of tissue physiology, such as blood composition and oxygenation, to support intraoperative decisions which, despite significant advances in digital and robotic surgery, continue to rely predominantly on the surgeon’s subjective visual assessment.
Hyperspectral imaging technology captures light across a wide range of wavelengths and records narrow spectral bands (ranging from tens to hundreds) for each pixel in the image, generating a rich three-dimensional dataset comprising two spatial dimensions and one spectral dimension. In the surgical field, as different biological materials reflect light differently at specific wavelengths, this technology provides real-time information that enables the identification of different types of tissue, including tumour tissue, and their characteristics, without physical contact or interruptions to the surgical procedure.
As part of the deal, Tanja Dowe, managing director of Angelini Ventures, and Rick Mangat, founder of Novadaq and a pioneer in surgical imaging, will join Hypervision’s board of directors.
The Series A round also includes further funding from existing investors: Heran Partners, Redalpine, LifeX Ventures and Zeiss Ventures, as well as a strategic investment from the Sinc fund, managed by Sages Ingenuity (the division dedicated to commercial innovation within the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons, one of the world’s leading surgical societies), and Macmillan Cancer Support, a British charity dedicated to the fight against cancer, confirming the project’s validation by both the international surgical community and leading oncology organisations.
Tanja Dowe said in a statement: “We believe that investing in innovative, connected technologies that assist doctors in their work – enabling greater precision for each individual patient and ensuring safety during operating theatre procedures – is essential to continuously improve clinical outcomes, particularly in the most complex procedures. With this investment, we aim to support the Hypervision team during its growth phase and in defining a strategic path towards scalability and the increasingly widespread clinical adoption of the Hyperspectral Intelligence platform, including through international collaborations.”
Michael Ebner, CEO and co-founder of Hypervision Surgical, says: “This Series A round represents a milestone in our mission to enhance surgical intelligence through hyperspectral imaging. By combining advanced spectral detection technologies with cloud-enabled AI-based analysis, we are building a new generation of intelligent surgical systems to provide surgeons with real-time information on tissues that was previously impossible to obtain.”
At the heart of Hypervision’s approach lies Hyperspectral Intelligence, the technological platform that combines proprietary on-chip spectral sensors, patented AI analysis and a scalable cloud-based architecture: together, these technologies are capable of transforming surgical imaging into a real-time, data-driven decision-making tool, providing previously invisible, single-pixel-level information on tissue physiology and composition during surgery. Hypervision shifts surgical imaging from a static, hardware-limited model to a flexible, software-centric paradigm, designed for continuous evolution and capable of transforming traditional surgical cameras into data-rich diagnostic tools.
Hypersnap, the commercial surgical system developed by Hypervision, represents the first clinical application of the Hyperspectral Intelligence platform and is based on the Nvidia IGX architecture, utilising its advanced edge computing capabilities to support real-time AI inference in the operating theatre. The system is certified in the UK and approved by the US FDA for open and minimally invasive general surgery. The system has also been selected for the FDA’s Safer Technologies Programme (STeP), which has recognised its potential to improve the safety of existing surgical procedures.
The company’s aim is to integrate Hyperspectral Intelligence into laparoscopic, robotic, microscopic and endoscopic surgical platforms, enabling more accurate data analysis across the hundreds of millions of surgical procedures performed each year.
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