The British implant maker is building a business around what an X-ray cannot tell you: how a replacement joint behaves in motion. Its wager joins metal, robotics and surgical data.
It stopped making the Band-Aid. What is left is a $94-billion bet that the future of Johnson & Johnson is written on a prescription pad and a robotic arm.
Medtronic began by repairing hospital electronics in a Minneapolis garage. Seventy-seven years later, its devices sit inside bodies, beside beds, and at the center of a high-stakes contest to make medicine less invasive, more measurable, and easier to scale.
NDR Medical Technology is a Singapore-based deep-tech company building AI-empowered interventional robotics for minimally invasive, image-guided surgery. Its Automated Needle Targeting (ANT) platform combines hardware and software to plan and align percutaneous needle placement with roughly ±1mm accuracy using a hospital's existing imaging equipment. Its flagship ANT-X robot received U.S. FDA 510(k) clearance in 2023 as the first automated device to aid kidney access for percutaneous nephrolithotomy, while ANT-C brings AI CT-based lesion targeting to procedures across the lung, liver, kidney and spine.
AiM Medical Robotics is a Worcester, Massachusetts medical device company building a portable, MRI-compatible surgical robot that lets neurosurgeons operate under continuous, real-time MRI guidance. Spun out of Gregory Fischer's Automation and Interventional Medicine (AIM) lab at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the platform aims to make procedures such as deep brain stimulation lead placement, biopsy, tumor ablation and targeted drug delivery faster, more precise and less variable - reducing procedure time by up to 50% and expanding access to advanced neurosurgical care.
Mendaera is a Silicon Valley healthcare technology company building Focalist, a fist-sized handheld robotic system that pairs real-time ultrasound imaging with robotic needle guidance and AI to make precise, needle-based procedures more accessible across specialties. Founded in 2020 by Josh DeFonzo and Jason Wilson, both alumni of Auris Health, and backed by Intuitive Surgical and Auris co-founder Dr. Fred Moll, the company aims to move robotics beyond the operating room and into the everyday procedures that make up the bulk of medicine.
Roboto AI is a Seattle-based analytics platform for robotics and Physical AI teams. It ingests multimodal robot logs - ROS bags, PX4/ULog, MCAP, Parquet, video - and uses AI agents plus a Python SDK and CLI to automatically search, analyze, and surface edge cases, anomalies, and failures across entire robot fleets. Founded in 2022 by former Amazon Robotics leaders Benji Barash and Yves Albers-Schoenberg, the company spun out of the Allen Institute for AI and raised a $4.8M seed to help robotics developers stop digging through petabytes of sensor data by hand.
Capstan Medical is a Santa Cruz, California medical device company building a robotic, catheter-based platform to repair and replace heart valves through minimally invasive procedures. By merging surgical robotics, catheter-based delivery, and next-generation implants, the company aims to bring structural heart intervention - starting with mitral and tricuspid valve regurgitation - to patients who are too sick or too high-risk for open-heart surgery. Founded in 2020 and led by CEO Maggie Nixon, Capstan has raised more than $140 million and completed its first robot-assisted transcatheter mitral valve replacements in humans.
XCath Robotics is a Houston-based medical robotics company building next-generation endovascular robotic systems and steerable smart guidewires to treat stroke, brain aneurysms and other neurovascular conditions. Its flagship Iris system is the only endovascular robot in development capable of intracranial navigation, and the company is racing toward a clinical telerobot that could let a specialist perform a brain-clot removal on a patient hundreds of miles away.
Sovato is a Santa Barbara health-tech company building the first comprehensive, system-agnostic platform for remote robotic surgery and procedures - what the industry calls telesurgery. Co-founded by surgical-robotics pioneer Yulun Wang and healthcare strategist Cynthia Perazzo, Sovato lets a skilled surgeon operate a robotic system from hundreds or thousands of miles away, aiming to extend top surgical care to patients regardless of where they live. The company has raised $41M across its rounds and helped enable the longest-distance telesurgery ever completed.
ZAP Surgical Systems is a San Carlos, California medical device company that designed and manufactures the ZAP-X Gyroscopic Radiosurgery platform - a self-shielded, vault-free system for non-invasive treatment of brain tumors and other intracranial conditions. Founded by Stanford neurosurgeon and CyberKnife inventor John R. Adler, ZAP is on a mission to democratize stereotactic radiosurgery by eliminating the need for radioactive isotopes and concrete bunkers.