Gauss Surgical, an AI-driven healthcare technology company, raised $20 million in Series C funding from Northwell Health and SoftBank Ventures Korea, the global early-stage venture capital arm of SoftBank Group, as well as from the LS Polaris Innovation Fund and seven other leading U.S. health systems. The proceeds of the round will be used to accelerate the adoption of its Triton platform in hospitals and to develop new AI-driven applications for the operating room.
The company’s flagship product, Triton, monitors surgical blood loss in real time using digital imaging and machine learning on the iPad. It has received de novo approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and a European CE mark. It is in increasingly widespread use in hospitals across the United States; so far, Triton has been adopted by 50 hospitals which perform more than 200,000 infant deliveries each year.
Doctors have traditionally relied on their own subjective visual estimates of blood loss by eyeballing the surgical field. This practice is notoriously inaccurate. Triton captures rapid scans of blood-containing sponges and canisters and uses computer vision and machine learning to estimate blood loss with significantly higher accuracy and precision.
According to a recent study of 2,781 caesarean section patients published in the American Journal of Perinatology, implementing Triton was associated with significant increases in recognition of maternal hemorrhage and significant decreases in blood product transfusions and hospital length of stay.
“The practical application of AI in hospitals will be a major growth driver in the medical technology industry, especially in addressing high-cost, high-impact unmet clinical needs,” said Siddarth Satish, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Gauss. “We are pleased to be strategically aligned with investors who bring significant operational experience both in AI-enabled services and in healthcare as we scale our platform.”
Like several of the healthcare systems investing in this round, Northwell Health is already using Triton in its hospital delivery rooms.
“Gauss has shown a real impact in improved quantification of blood loss in our obstetrical patients and helps refine our treatment approach to maternal hemorrhage,” said Michael Nimaroff, Senior Vice President of OB-GYN Services at Northwell Health. “Reducing maternal mortality and morbidly has become a major patient safety priority at Northwell and at hospitals around the nation.”
