Fred Moll, the cofounder of $200 billion Intuitive Surgical, has invested in some 15 companies building robots that could help make both complex and common surgeries more accessible to everyone.
Dr. Fred Moll left the practice of medicine more than four decades ago. But he’s responsible for some 3 million surgeries a year, done by robots that he helped invent as the cofounder of Intuitive Surgical, the leader in robotic surgeries with more than 10,000 machines deployed and $8.4 billion in 2024 revenue.
Now, three decades after its founding and nearly 25 years since he departed Intuitive to start more companies, Moll has plowed around $100 million of his own funds into the next generation of surgical robotics startups. Colonoscopies. Cataract surgeries. Heart-valve replacements. One day, he’s betting these and a slew of other medical procedures will be performed by robots, improved over time by AI that analyzes what’s worked and what hasn’t in similar situations in the past. The goal is to bring the best medical care to everyone, whether they’re in New York or Nagpur.
“I’ve spent my career watching other people do surgery. The difference between a good surgeon and an average surgeon is massive,” Moll, 73, told Forbes. “My ambition is that the robot can do procedures that people struggle with. Its impact is to raise the level of capability of average surgeons to very good surgeons in procedures that not everyone is good at.”
One such operation is brain surgery, which requires extraordinary precision. Moll is both chairman and an investor in Houston-based XCath (valued at $62 million, per PitchBook), which performed the first robotic brain aneurysm procedure in a human in Panama this November. XCath CEO Eduardo Fonseca said Moll has been helpful in making sure its robot didn’t become overly complex for doctors to use. “If you want your technology to succeed, you listen to what Dr. Fred says very seriously, and time will prove that he’s right,” he said.
Moll has also invested Neptune Medical (worth $387 million, according to PitchBook), which makes robots for gastrointestinal procedures, and its spinout company, Jupiter Endovascular; ForSight Robotics (worth an estimated $500 million), an Israeli firm that’s developing robots for cataract surgery; and Vitestro, which is based in the Netherlands and does autonomous blood collection. He sees potential too in Santa Cruz, California-based Capstan Medical (worth $367 million, according to VC database Pitchbook), which is developing a robot-assisted method for performing mitral valve replacement, an extremely tricky procedure. They’re all at early stages, in development or, in some cases, available for sale outside the U.S.
“He has been a forward thinker on where [robotics] can go,” said Maggie Nixon, Capstan’s CEO who worked at Intuitive early in her career. “I think his sweet spot is in that early space.”
The largest company he’s backed is Gurugram, India-based SS Innovations International, a publicly traded firm with a market cap of $1.2 billion that builds robots for a variety of different types of surgery, including cardiac, urologic and gynecologic. The company’s tech also allows surgeons to operate remotely. In November, SS Innovations’ founder Dr. Sudhir Srivastava performed a robotic assisted coronary bypass from his New Delhi home on a patient 185 miles away in the northwest Indian city of Jaipur—one of numerous recent cases of telesurgery abroad that could help people in remote areas get access to care. While “some people might wring their hands about this,” Moll said, “I’ve gone from a skeptic to a believer.”
For founders, Moll’s involvement in a company, as an investor, advisor or board member, is something of a Good Housekeeping seal of approval. He invests personally and through a small venture firm, Sonder Capital, where he is a cofounder and partner, that focuses on early-stage medtech startups. Forbes estimates that Moll is worth more than $500 million, and calculates that if he’d never sold any of his shares of Intuitive Surgical they’d be worth $3.3 billion.
Intuitive’s success—it’s publicly traded with a market cap of $200 billion—is due to its first-mover advantage. It launched its da Vinci robots in 2000, well before any other company. To operate one, a surgeon sits at a console and views the surgical site on a high-definition 3D screen. The robot, equipped with surgical tools that can fit through small incisions in the human body, mimics that doctor’s hand movements with precision.
Moll has seen enough in three decades in the industry that there’s one thing he won’t invest in: Companies that are building “me too” robots too similar to Intuitive’s.
“Robotics is littered with companies that don’t work,” he said. “Their characteristic is they thought, ‘I can build a robotic surgical device, and maybe it doesn’t get the valuation of Intuitive, but we’d be happy with something smaller in the same ballpark.’ What they don’t understand is that it’s all about clinical capability. Surgeons live with the da Vinci robots—if they are going to use something else, they want to know why.”
Moll’s obsession with robots didn’t begin with robots at all. In the 1980s, when Moll was a young doctor fresh from medical school at the University of Washington, laparoscopic surgery was in its infancy. During his surgical residency at Virginia Mason Medical Center, he wondered why the new technique, in which surgeons make small incisions with the aid of a camera, wasn’t being used more broadly. “I got very excited at an early age not by robotics, but by minimally invasive surgery,” he said.
Rather than continue on in his practice as a doctor, Moll left his surgical residency to develop a device called a safety trocar, which covers the sharp tips of a laparoscope so that it does as little damage as possible to a patient. He then founded two companies in laparoscopic surgery, one of which was acquired by United States Surgical, the other by Eli Lilly. “I had enough success that I got hooked on entrepreneurship and invention,” said Moll, who then picked up a master’s degree in business management from Stanford.
In the early 1990s, Moll learned that the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) was working on ways for surgeons to remotely operate on soldiers on a battlefield. Through telesurgery, they were figuring out how a MASH unit surgeon could send detailed instructions to a trauma unit so that the far-away surgeon’s hand movements could be translated onto a patient. “My first thought was, ‘Why can’t you do this for laparoscopy?” he wondered. At the time, surgeons often struggled with long sticks that lacked dexterity for operating on a patient. He realized that a robot outfitted with mechanical wrists that held surgical tools could translate their hand movements.
In 1995, he cofounded Intuitive Surgical with former investment banker Dr. John Freund and electrical engineer Robert Younge to develop the concept. Five years later, Intuitive launched the da Vinci robotic system, which can be used for urologic, gynecologic, cardiothoracic and head and neck surgeries, as well as general surgery. Now the dominant maker of surgical robots, Intuitive announced in its Q3 earnings that as of September its installed base of da Vinci robots reached 10,763, up 13% from 9,539 the previous year. They have now performed more than 14 million surgeries. Its latest 12-month revenue (through September 30) hit $9.6 billion, a 22% increase from $7.9 billion year-over-year.
Moll, though, wasn’t there for most of that growth. He left Intuitive back in 2002 after a stint as its CEO and went back to starting companies. That year, he launched Hansen Medical, which developed robots for vascular procedures. Then, in 2007, he cofounded Auris Health, which developed a robotic-assisted system for diagnosing lung cancer. It subsequently bought Hansen for $80 million, before itself being acquired by J&J in 2019 for $3.4 billion upfront with another $2.35 billion due upon reaching certain commercial and regulatory milestones. (That deal resulted in finger-pointing and litigation over J&J’s efforts to reach those milestones. In 2024, the Delaware Court of Chancery ordered J&J to pay more than $1 billion for violating its merger agreement.) Moll, who spent a few years at J&J as chief development officer following the acquisition, left in 2023—allowing him to again focus on early-stage inventions.
In 2023, SS Innovations’ Dr. Srivastava sought out Moll as an investor. As a top cardiac surgeon in Texas, Srivastava was an early customer of Intuitive—and figures he’s done a whopping 1,400 cardiac surgeries with the help of robots, mostly the da Vinci. But when he moved to India in 2011, Srivastava said, he “very quickly realized that the cost of the da Vinci was prohibitive.” He decided to build his own, more affordable surgical robot. “All Indian surgeons know about robotics, but they don’t do robotics because they can’t afford it,” said Moll, whose 11% stake in SS Innovations is now worth $120 million.
After a rocky early start, SS Innovations is now growing fast: Its revenue more than doubled in the first nine months of this year (thru September 30) to $28 million from $12.5 million in the same period last year. A big reason is price. Today, Srivastava said, SS Innovations’ robots sell for as little as $600,000 compared with $2 million or more for da Vinci’s newest model. “Some people buy a Cadillac or Rolls Royce and others buy a Ford,” Srivastava said. The company now plans to file with the FDA for clearance in the U.S. before year end.
Most of Moll’s other bets are focused on robots that can improve care for complex or repetitive procedures where specialists are scarce. One potential area for neurovascular surgery-focused XCath is responding to strokes. Moll sees the opportunity to use robots to cut the time between when someone has a stroke and when they can have the clot that caused it removed–a huge deal because each minute of delay results in the death of nearly 2 million brain cells. A big advantage of a robot for a brain surgeon is that the person can make very large movements with his or her hands and the machine can translate that motion to a cramped space where sub-millimeter movements make a difference. “It can translate gross movements to fine movements, and in aneurysm surgery that’s exactly what you need,” he said.
Robots are also very good at high-volume repetitive tasks. To that end, Moll invested in ForSight Robotics, an Israeli firm developing robots for cataract surgery, which is one of the world’s most common medical procedures with more than 4 million of them a year in the U.S. alone. With a shortage of doctors to meet that demand, ForSight raised a total of $195 million at an estimated $500 million valuation earlier this year. Moll joined as an investor and strategic advisory board member in June because, as he said, “it’s taking on a massive opportunity.” ForSight has been testing its robot on pig eyes.
And now AI is here, which adds a whole new layer of opportunity to surgical robotics, particularly around using vast amounts of data to improve their capabilities. “I feel like there’s an opportunity to use what we started 30 years ago that really leapfrogs the capabilities that we have,” he said.
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2025/12/03/robotic-surgery-legend-fred-moll-is-pouring-100-million-into-next-gen-medical-startups/
