Rosota Raises $965K Seed Round to Build AI-Native Surgical Robots

South Korean startup Rosota, a spin-off from the MediSC Lab at Seoul National University Hospital’s Department of Transdisciplinary Medicine, has raised a $965K (KRW 1.5 billion) seed round. Futureplay led the round, with Schmidt and ZDVC participating.

Rosota is developing AI-powered surgical robots built on surgical data. Today’s global surgical robotics market is dominated by teleoperation systems such as Da Vinci and Medtronic, where surgeons directly control the robotic arms. Rosota is aiming to build “AI-native surgical robots” that understand and learn from surgical situations on their own, supporting a surgeon’s judgment in real time.

At the core of its technology is a surgical data infrastructure. The company is building a proprietary data pipeline that collects and anonymizes video, instrument movement, and sensor data generated during surgery in real time, then feeds it into AI model training.

Rosota plans to use the new funding to hire core R&D talent, upgrade its surgical data collection devices, advance its AI models, and expand its clinical partnership network.

“Our goal is to build an environment, powered by surgical data infrastructure, where AI amplifies a surgeon’s capabilities so that more patients anywhere in the world can receive high-quality surgery,” said Yechan Seo, CEO of Rosota.