He built a lamp that lets a surgeon see through skin. The anatomy moves when you do.
Picture an operating table. A surgeon is about to make a cut over a spine she cannot see. For a century the answer has been to guess, to feel, or to stop and shoot an X-ray and squint at a screen across the room. Eldrick Millares thought that was absurd. So he built Skylight, a surgical lamp that paints the patient's own anatomy directly onto their skin, in real time, while the surgeon works.
"It's like a live tattoo that moves with the patient," he says. "It updates in real time, tells you exactly where you need to cut, the angle you need to go, and how deep you need to go." No goggles. No headset. No wearables clipped to anyone's face. Just light, falling on a body, telling the truth about what is underneath.
Millares is the co-founder and co-CEO of Illuminant Surgical, the Los Angeles company behind Skylight, which it calls the first real-time anatomical projection system. The pitch fits in four words that sound like a comic book and read like a product spec: give surgeons X-ray vision.
That is the part that lands in headlines. The part that matters to Millares is duller and more important - the accuracy. Skylight hits sub-two-millimeter precision while tracking instruments and mapping anatomy on a moving, breathing person. Two millimeters is roughly the width of two stacked credit cards. In a spinal procedure, it is the difference between a screw that holds and a second surgery.
What Skylight does is display images directly on a patient's skin to tell you exactly what's underneath as you're cutting. You can basically get X-ray vision.
Image-guided procedures fail more often than most patients realize. Illuminant puts the problem in stark fractions - and pegs the cost to the healthcare system at over $20 billion a year.
Adhesive markers plus computer vision track the body without a single incision. The patient breathes; the map breathes with them.
A depth-adaptive projector throws imaging onto the skin and bends it to the body's contours, so the anatomy lands where the anatomy actually is.
Real-time imaging, instrument tracking and anatomical mapping at sub-2mm accuracy. An AR display with nothing to wear.
Before the surgical lamp, there was a kid who moved from the Philippines to West Virginia. The company describes his arc in three words it does not use lightly: determination, faith, and perseverance. Those words usually mean someone took the long road.
The long road ran through Stanford, where Millares earned both a bachelor's and a master's in electrical engineering, did microfluidics research, and learned digital design. Engineering was not a step toward medicine for him. It was the whole point - the discipline of making physical things behave.
He took that discipline to Apple, where he worked on chip design and advanced sensing systems, the unglamorous guts that let a device understand the world around it. Then to Red Leader Tech, a lidar startup, where he led hardware and software together. Sensing, again. Teaching machines to measure reality precisely. It is not a coincidence that he ended up building a system whose entire job is knowing, to the millimeter, where a body is.
The co-founder is Dr. James Hu, a Stanford classmate with a bioengineering degree and an MD from UC Irvine. One of them speaks fluent silicon; the other speaks fluent surgeon. "Surgery is one of the highest-stakes environments in the world," Hu says, "and even small mistakes can have life-changing consequences." Hu sees a future where open surgery becomes rare and the everyday cases all go through a needle-sized hole in the skin. Millares is building the eyes that make that possible.
Disney Imagineering projects clothes on performers while they're onstage. We now have one of those folks here working with us - we're projecting anatomy on patients.
Most medical-device startups cluster near hospitals or in the Bay Area. Millares planted Illuminant in Los Angeles on purpose - so he could hire engineers from tech and from entertainment in the same building. The marquee recruit was a former Disney Imagineering projection specialist who once made costumes appear on live dancers. Same physics. New stakes. Instead of a sequined gown on a performer, it is a spinal column on a patient, drawn in light that follows the body as it moves.
The $8.4M seed was led by Wing 2 Wing Ventures, with Elderberry Ventures and Soma Capital in the round. Roughly half of the money came from federal research grants - a vote of confidence with a different flavor than a term sheet.
Wing 2 Wing Ventures led the seed round.
Elderberry Ventures and Soma Capital joined.
National Science Foundation, National Cancer Institute and National Institute on Aging grants funded about half.
Our mission from day one has been to build technology that doctors actually want to use.
From the Philippines to West Virginia before he ever set foot at Stanford.
Two Stanford degrees in electrical engineering - bachelor's and master's.
Worked on chip design at Apple before building a medical-device company.
An ex-Disney Imagineering projection expert is on the team.
Skylight needs no headsets or wearables - it's a smart surgical lamp.
Forbes 30 Under 30 in Healthcare, alongside his co-founders.
Millares walks through building the first real-time anatomical projection system on the onStartups podcast.