XRlabs raises $8.4M seed to put surgical AI in every operating room

XRlabs, the London surgical intelligence company founded by practising neurosurgeon Dr Ali Haddad, has raised an $8.4M seed led by Playground Global, with Eka Ventures participating, to take its device-agnostic operating room AI through regulatory pathways in the UK, Europe and the US.

Walk into any operating room in Europe and you will find a million euros of equipment that cannot talk to each other. The scope does not know what the navigation system knows; neither knows what the pre-operative scan showed. The company that just raised to fix this is not building another machine – it is building the intelligence layer that makes the machines hospitals already own work as one. Below, I lay out the round, the product behind it, and why the name taking the board chair says as much as the name on the term sheet.

An $8.4M seed with a Palo Alto lead and a London address

XRlabs announced an $8.4M seed round on 19 October 2026, led by Playground Global, the Palo Alto deep tech firm, with participation from Eka Ventures, the London health-focused investor (company announcement, 19 October 2026). The company is headquartered at the London Institute for Healthcare Engineering and keeps a second office in Palo Alto.

The funds will, in the company’s words, “grow the engineering and clinical teams” and “advance the platform through regulatory pathways in the UK, Europe and the United States”, while expanding its clinical evidence base across partner institutions on three continents.

The round comes with a signing that would be the headline at most growth-stage companies: Omar Ishrak, who led Medtronic as chairman and CEO from 2011 to 2020 and previously chaired Intel’s board, joins as chair of the board. “I’ve spent my career bringing new technology into hospitals, and I see that same potential in Ali and the team at XRlabs,” Ishrak said in the announcement.

A neurosurgeon’s answer to the disconnected operating room

Founded in 2024, XRlabs builds modular, device-agnostic software that sits as an external AI layer across existing surgical systems. XRlabs SIM turns CT and MRI scans into 3D digital twins for patient-specific planning and rehearsal; SurgicalOS brings that twin into the live operative view, using computer vision and deep learning to fuse live video, navigation telemetry and pre-operative imaging into one anatomy-aware picture. It runs on 4K 3D surgical scopes and interfaces with the navigation systems hospitals already own.

The platform has been used in more than 100 surgical cases on three continents, the company says, including the first-in-human use of physical AI in cranial neurosurgery, integrated with the ORBEYE 4K 3D exoscope under research conditions, and AI-designed patient-specific implants used in a craniopagus twin separation with the UK charity Gemini Untwined. The company is a global NVIDIA partner in robotics, building on Jetson Thor and Isaac for Healthcare; XRlabs SIM was named in TIME’s Best Inventions of 2025, and the company holds a compute allocation on the UK’s AI Research Resource.

“Our conviction is that the operating room is the next frontier for physical AI,” Haddad said in the announcement. Bruce Leak, general partner at Playground Global, framed the bet more plainly: “someone who has lived the problem, backed by people who can build the solution.”

A $9.6bn navigation market growing at 13.7%

The segment XRlabs plugs into can be sized. Global surgical navigation systems were a $9.6bn market in 2025 and are projected to grow at a 13.7% CAGR from 2026 to 2033 (Grand View Research, June 2026). For a seed-stage company, the telling number inside that figure is the installed base it implies: every one of those navigation systems, scopes and imaging suites is a device XRlabs does not have to build, certify from scratch or sell – only connect.

Our own records put the round in scale. At one end of the UK surgical stack, Cambridge-based CMR Surgical took $400M from Stryker on 12 October, with a buyout option attached; at the other, St Helens-based Inovus Medical raised £15M for surgical training simulators at the end of September. An $8.4M seed for the software layer between the machines sits exactly where you would expect the next layer of that stack to start.

What the chair seat tells us about European medtech

So why does a Palo Alto firm best known for hard tech lead a London medtech seed? Because the capital-intensive part of the operating room is already built. What we are seeing, from CMR’s Stryker deal to this round, is one generation of surgical hardware maturing into strategics’ hands while a new software generation raises its first rounds on top of it. The good news is that Europe is supplying both generations – and in XRlabs’ case, the founder is a surgeon who lived the problem rather than a lab spin-out hunting for a use case.

The Ishrak signing is the sharper signal. Operators who ran the world’s largest device company do not chair two-year-old seed companies for sentiment; they chair them when the regulatory path – UK, Europe, US, all three named in the use of funds – looks like one they have walked before. Three things to watch from here: how fast the clinical evidence base grows beyond the first 100 cases, which scope and navigation vendors open their telemetry to the platform, and whether the next round is priced in London or Palo Alto.

Europe keeps producing the surgeons, the scopes and the software. The opportunity is keeping all three in the same operating room – and on the same cap tables. Follow the rounds as they land on our fundraising data hub; this stack is moving fast.