UPDATE: Sept. 21, 2023: CMR Surgical has its eye on the U.S. market opportunity. “The US markets offer significant market potential for CMR. We are invested in the FDA process and have been judiciously working with the FDA towards submission,” company spokesperson Ashley Davis-Marin told MedTech Dive Thursday in an email.
Dive Brief:
- CMR Surgical, a competitor to robotic surgery leader Intuitive Surgical, has raised $165 million in funding as it prepares to launch its Versius soft tissue system into more geographies.
- The influx will fund further commercialization of the system in existing markets as well, and will support continued product innovation, the company said Wednesday.
- More than 15,000 procedures have been performed globally across seven surgical specialties with the aid of its robot, according to the company, up from 10,000 cases announced in April.
Dive Insight:
UK-based CMR Surgical positions its robot as a smaller, more affordable alternative in a market dominated by Intuitive’s da Vinci system.
Intuitive is expecting procedure growth of 20% to 22% this year, a forecast it raised in July as robot-assisted surgery continues to gain in popularity. The Sunnyvale, California-based robot maker boosted its outlook even as it cautioned that new weight-loss drugs are crimping demand for bariatric surgeries.
Robotic soft tissue procedures represent one of the fastest-growing and under-penetrated markets in medtech, according to analysts at J.P. Morgan.
Privately held CMR’s latest financing follows a $600 million funding round in 2021 that CB Insights called the year’s second largest across the healthcare industry. At the time, the round brought CMR’s total disclosed investments to $986 million.
The new funding round was increased from its initial size due to strong demand, CMR said, and was led by all of the company’s major existing investors, including Ally Bridge Group, Cambridge Innovation Capital, Escala Capital, LGT, Lightrock, RPMI Railpen, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Tencent and Watrium.
To date, more than 140 Versius systems have been installed in hospitals in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa, and the robot has been used to perform over 130 complex and benign procedure types, according to CMR.
The company in March appointed Supratim Bose, formerly of Johnson & Johnson, Boston Scientific and ConvaTec, as its new CEO, replacing Per Vegard Nerseth. Bose joined CMR in February as a senior adviser to the CEO, leading commercial operations across Asia, the Middle East and Africa.