XRlabs raises $8.4M seed led by Playground Global for operating-room AI

XRlabs, a London startup founded by practising neurosurgeon Ali Haddad, said in a press release distributed by Business Wire on Oct 19 that it has raised $8.4 million in seed funding led by Playground Global, with participation from Eka Ventures. It did not disclose a valuation. Medtronic's former chairman and chief executive Omar Ishrak joined as chair of the board alongside the round. [Company profile](/companies/xrlabs).

The company describes its product as an external AI layer for the operating room rather than a new machine. It said its platform already runs on 4K 3D surgical scopes, interfaces with navigation systems and fuses live video, navigation telemetry and pre-operative CT and MRI imaging into one anatomy-aware view. XRlabs said it has been named a global NVIDIA partner in robotics and uses NVIDIA Jetson Thor and Isaac for Healthcare to bring low-latency perception, tool tracking and intent-aware automation to surgical scopes. Its website states the intraoperative product, SurgicalOS, is in development and not commercially available, and that it was first evaluated in a live operating room in December 2025, which the company calls the first in-human use of physical AI in complex cranial neurosurgery. The commercial product today is XRlabs SIM, which rebuilds CT and MRI scans as 3D models for surgical planning in extended reality and was named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2025.

Where the money goes, as the company states it

XRlabs said the seed money will grow its engineering and clinical teams, take the platform through regulatory pathways in the UK, Europe and the United States, and widen its clinical evidence across partner institutions on three continents. It has also been awarded compute time on the UK AI Research Resource, the government's national AI compute infrastructure. Its website lists more than 100 cases worldwide.

The step from pre-seed to seed is 3.65 times in 616 days (8.4 / 2.3; Feb 10, 2025 to Oct 19, 2026), and disclosed funding now totals $10.7 million. Eka Ventures backed both rounds.

How it compares with surgical robotics rounds in MEKAWIRE

Playground Global's other lead in MEKAWIRE's verified data is Agility Robotics' $150 million Series B in April 2022, and the fund also sits in rounds for Skydio, Robust AI and FarmWise. Bruce Leak, a general partner at Playground, said in the release that the strongest physical-AI companies come from founders who have lived the problem.

XRlabs' cheque is small next to the hardware makers: 5.6% of Distalmotion's $150 million Series G and 1.12 times Aleph Surgical's $7.5 million pre-seed. The four disclosed surgical and medical robotics amounts in our data for the past 12 months add up to $203.5 million before this round. The difference in business model matters more than the size. A software layer that rides on existing scopes and navigation systems avoids the capital cost of building an arm, which hardware makers such as [ZAP Surgical](/news/zap-surgical-36m-catalio-50th-zap-x-radiosurgery-robot-baheal-20261019) carry, but it depends on device makers opening their video and telemetry outputs. The [surgical robots market explainer](/news/surgical-robots-market-2026-explained-11710-da-vinci-systems-8400-surgical-robots-sold-challengers-backed-by-medtech-giants-20261017) maps those hardware players.

The open questions are regulatory and commercial. SurgicalOS has no clearance yet, the company has not named a paying hospital for it, and intent-aware scope automation is the part most likely to draw scrutiny from regulators in the UK, the EU and the US. The next signals are a first regulatory filing for SurgicalOS and any device partner that agrees to ship XRlabs software with its scope or navigation system.