Distalmotion raises US$150 million to take its DEXTER surgical robot into US outpatient centres

Distalmotion, the Lausanne-based maker of the DEXTER surgical robot, said on 18 November 2025 that it had raised US$150 million in a Series G round led by Revival Healthcare Capital, with its existing investors also taking part. The company said the money would go mainly into US commercial adoption of DEXTER, with ambulatory surgery centres (ASCs) as the priority, and into clinical and product development.

The round matches the US$150 million Series F that Distalmotion announced in April 2023, which means the company has disclosed US$300 million across its last two equity rounds. It did not publish a valuation, the size of individual commitments or the names of the participating insiders, and none of those figures appear in this article.

Alongside the financing, Distalmotion named Chas McKhann executive chairman. The company said McKhann has more than 25 years in medical technology and life sciences and previously ran two listed device companies, Apollo Endosurgery and Silk Road Medical, as chief executive. Greg Roche remains chief executive. Distalmotion keeps its headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, and runs its US business from Cleveland, Ohio.

At the time of the raise, the company said DEXTER had treated nearly 3,000 patients in Europe and the United States. Its US clearances then covered laparoscopic inguinal hernia repair, cholecystectomy (cleared by the FDA through a 510(k) announced on 28 May 2025) and total benign hysterectomy including salpingo-oophorectomy, which the company described on 1 October 2025 as its third FDA clearance. In Europe the system has carried a CE mark since 2022 for general, gynaecologic and urologic laparoscopic surgery. In June 2025 Distalmotion said AdventHealth had bought multiple DEXTER systems.

The months after the raise filled in the strategy. On 12 January 2026 Distalmotion said Johnson & Johnson Innovation, through its venture arm JJDC, had made a strategic investment of undisclosed size to support the ASC push. The company put the three procedures it was then cleared for among the five most common ambulatory operations, representing more than 2.5 million outpatient procedures a year in the US. On 1 April 2026 it said it had filed with the FDA to extend into uro-gynaecology, and on 16 June it announced 510(k) clearance for four gynaecology procedures: sacrocolpopexy, sacrocervicopexy, sacrohysteropexy and endometriosis resection. On 21 May it named HonorHealth, SCA and Surgery Partners, including Cypress Surgery Center, among organisations building DEXTER programmes.

The latest step came on 13 August 2026, when the company said the FDA had cleared the DEXTER L6 system for laparoscopic ventral hernia repair, supported by its RAVEN study. That brought the US label to five indications: inguinal hernia, ventral hernia, cholecystectomy, total benign hysterectomy with salpingo-oophorectomy, and sacrocolpopexy, all for adults aged 22 and over. Distalmotion repeated that more than 4,000 patients had been treated, a figure it first gave in June, and said that the US performs over 600,000 ventral hernia repairs a year with more than 75% done on an ambulatory basis, and that its top four procedures add up to more than 3 million operations annually.

The technical pitch is about fitting into rooms that were never designed for a robot. The company describes DEXTER as a soft tissue system with a small mobile footprint, wristed instruments, an open architecture that works with operating room equipment a hospital already owns, and a surgeon console that can be placed flexibly in the sterile field. That design is meant to let one surgeon move between robotic and standard laparoscopic steps without rebuilding the room, which matters in a centre that turns over many short cases a day.

Distalmotion is arriving as the incumbents and the conglomerates move in. Intuitive's da Vinci platform dominates soft tissue robotics. Medtronic received FDA clearance for its Hugo system in urology in December 2025, and Johnson & Johnson filed its own Ottava robot with the FDA through the De Novo pathway in January 2026, the same month its venture arm invested in Distalmotion. In Europe, CMR Surgical said in April 2025 it had secured more than US$200 million in equity and debt for its Versius system.

For the global market the significance is segmentation. Roche said in January that soft tissue robotics is splitting into distinct segments, and Distalmotion is betting that the outpatient centre, where cost per case and room turnover decide purchases, will reward a lighter system rather than the most capable one. The risks are plain. The company has not disclosed system placements, revenue or the price of DEXTER, so the commercial traction behind the patient counts cannot be measured from the outside, and well-funded rivals are chasing the same procedures.