London-based “Surgical Intelligence” company XRlabs raises €7.48 million to bring AI into the operating room
XRlabs, the London-based Surgical Intelligence company built by surgeons for surgeons, has raised €7.48 million ($8.4 million) in Seed funding.
The round was led by Playground Global, the DeepTech-focused venture firm based in Palo Alto, with participation from London-based HealthTech investor Eka Ventures. Alongside the fundraise, XRlabs also announced that Omar Ishrak, who led Medtronic as Chairman and CEO from 2011 to 2020 and previously served as chairman of Intel’s board, has joined as Chair of its Board of Directors.
“The best physical AI companies come from people who’ve experienced a problem in their field firsthand and have the deep expertise to know how to fix it,” said Bruce Leak, General Partner at Playground Global.
Founded by practising neurosurgeon Dr. Ali Haddad in 2024, XRlabs is headquartered in London at the London Institute for Healthcare Engineering, with a second office in Palo Alto, California. The company develops modular, device-agnostic software that sits as an external AI layer across the surgical systems hospitals already own.
Its platform uses computer vision and deep learning to transform live video from surgical scopes, navigation telemetry, and pre-operative CT and MRI imaging into a single real-time, anatomy-aware view of each procedure. XRlabs says its platform has been deployed across more than 100 surgical cases on three continents.
The company offers two core products: XRlabs SIM and SurgicalOS. The XRlabs SIM is a patient-specific planning and rehearsal tool that transforms standard CT and MRI scans into interactive 3D reality models or digital twins, while SurgicalOS is an intraoperative intelligence layer that brings the digital twin created in SIM into the live operative view.
The XRlabs SIM and SurgicalOS together form what the company describes as “Pyramid of Surgical Intelligence,” a layered approach to building AI surgical understanding that mirrors how surgeons are trained, starting from anatomy and building toward real-time operative skill.
“Our conviction is that the operating room is the next frontier for physical AI. Surgery generates extraordinary data, yet almost none of it becomes intelligence in the moments that matter most. This financing lets us change that at scale, moving Surgical Intelligence from landmark first cases to foundational infrastructure in every operating room,” said Dr. Haddad, founder and CEO of XRlabs.
The funding comes on the back of major clinical achievements, including first-in-human use of physical AI in cranial neurosurgery, integrated with an ORBEYE 4K 3D exoscope under research conditions and a world-first in AI-designed patient-specific implants, used in the successful separation of craniopagus twins.
XRlabs says it will use the Seed funding to support the buildout of its engineering and clinical teams, advance its products through regulatory pathways in the UK, Europe, and the US, while extending the clinical evidence base at partner institutions globally. The company has also been awarded a compute allocation on the UK AI Research Resource (AIRR), the UK’s national AI compute infrastructure, which supports the development and scaling of its AI capabilities.
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