AcuSurgical raises 6 M€ (5.75M) in a series A Funding

Montpellier, France, February 18, 2021 – AcuSurgical, a startup developing a robotic assistant for vitreo-retinal surgery, announces a Series A funding of around 6€ million euros. The round was led by institutional investors Merieux Partners and Supernova Invest, with participations from IRDI-Soridec and Sofimac Innovation. The round aims to finance upcoming clinical trials and CE mark certification.

AcuSurgical designs and builds a robotic surgical assistant dedicated to the treatment of retinal diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD) affecting over 300 million patients worldwide including one in three Europeans aged over 70. AcuSurgical’s mission is to improve the precision and safety of current retinal procedures, augmenting the surgeons abilities and thus enabling new retinal surgeries. The aim is to treat the significative percentage of patients who today suffer from limited treatment options.

The innovative and unique robot was designed in collaboration with the LIRMM robotics laboratory, a joint research unit of the University of Montpellier and the CNRS (France) and vitreo-retinal surgeons at the Jean Monnet University in Saint-Etienne (France). The company recently signed a partnership with the Adolphe de Rothschild Foundation based in Paris.

« Our ambition is to enable innovative treatments for retinal disease that will open new perspectives for the numerous patients who today are impacted by these debilitating retinal conditions and who currently have limited options for treatment. We’re proud of the confidence afforded to us by this strong group of investors. Their support will allow us to grow the team and reach key milestones towards certification and commercialisation of our innovative surgical robotics platform » says Christoph SPUHLER, CEO and co-founder of AcuSurgical.

« We are delighted to partner with such an experienced team and look forward to supporting Acusurgical bring to market an innovative platform that will improve ocular surgeries and open new procedures in ophthalmology », says Valérie Calenda, Managing Partner at Mérieux Equity Partners. www.merieux-partners.com

« The robotics platform developed by AcuSurgical answers the needs of many retinal surgeons to perform complex procedures safely and reproducibly. We are very pleased to support this new venture and excellent team » says Celia Hart, General Partner at Supernova Invest. http://www.supernovainvest.com/

AcuSurgical was co-founded in 2020 by Christoph Spuhler, robotics professors Philippe Poignet and Yassine Haddab and vitreo-retinal surgeons and professors Philippe Gain and Gilles Thuret. The team is comprised of experts with significant previous experience in surgical robotics and ophthalmic medical devices. The company grew out of a collaboration between the co-founders and the LIRMM robotics laboratory accompanied by seed funding from the AxLR incubator. SATT AxLR specializes in the maturation and commercialization of innovative projects resulting from academic research.

The company has been incubated at the BIC since 2018, and has received i-site MUSE support.