Dive Brief:

• Mendaera raised $73 million to advance a handheld robotics platform for procedures such as biopsies, organ and vascular access, and pain management, the company said Thursday.
• The Silicon Valley-based firm said it is targeting a new category of robotics focused on common procedures that are involved in many patients’ treatment.
• Mendaera was co-founded by two former employees of Auris Health, the robotics company that Johnson & Johnson acquired for an initial $3.4 billion. Fred Moll, the founder of Intuitive Surgical and Auris, and venture capital funds that invested in Auris participated in Mendaera’s financing.

Dive Insight:

Intuitive created the robotic surgery industry by developing high-end equipment for use in procedures such as prostate gland removal. The sector has expanded and diversified over the past 25 years but many core healthcare procedures are still done manually. Needle interventions such as biopsies and regional anesthesia are commonplace and require skill to perform manually.

Mendaera said those “skills are deceptively hard to acquire [and] a scarcity of experienced proceduralists results in care bottlenecks and increased costs.” The company wants to lower the level of skill needed to perform procedures by providing a platform that combines robotics, artificial intelligence and imaging.

Josh DeFonzo, co-founder and CEO of Mendaera, discussed the technology at an investor event in March. 

“Our system allows providers to perform interventions with a few simple taps of a touchscreen monitor. The user is able to select a target of interest, and our system plans the appropriate instrument trajectory very simply,” DeFonzo said. “That planned trajectory can be modified as needed, in order to optimize for things like preferred skin entry site or avoiding an instrument path that might involve a critical anatomic structure.” 

Once the trajectory is confirmed, the system tracks the tip of the instrument as it is introduced into the body “in real time to near millimeter accuracy,” Mendaera said. The system alerts the user when it gets to the target, a feature DeFonzo said “is critical in things like biopsy and vascular access.”

DeFonzo and Jason Wilson co-founded Mendaera in 2020. DeFonzo was chief operating officer at Auris at the time of its takeover by J&J. Wilson spent almost two years at Auris but left before the J&J deal. Wilson is also Mendaera’s chief technical officer. 

The co-founders have enlisted the support of other people who played a part in the rise of Auris. Moll, the founder and CEO of Auris, invested in Mendaera’s latest round and contributed to its $24 million Series A last year. Lux Capital, a venture capital fund that backed Auris, also invested in both Mendaera’s rounds. PFM Health Sciences, another Auris backer, contributed to Mendaera’s Series B round. 

Mendaera has put together the syndicate to support its push to bring a product to market. In August 2023, the company expanded into a production facility and shifted its focus to completing development and obtaining clearance from the Food and Drug Administration. 

In December 2023, Mendaera struck a deal to use Butterfly Network’s ultrasound-on-chip technology in its robotic system. The companies were targeting a 2025 submission to the FDA at the time of the deal. Mendaera acquired the telepresence technology of Avail Medsystems in March.