Inner Logic (formerly Semaphor) today announced an $11.5 million seed round co-led by General Catalyst and Bison Ventures with participation from J2VP, Defined, PTX, Valia Ventures, Page One, Alumni Ventures, and Flare. Inner Logic gives device manufacturers the infrastructure to design, test, and validate procedural devices across thousands of virtual patients and procedures before clinical deployment. The same infrastructure provides the capabilities needed to make surgical autonomy a reality.
“Surgery is on the same path as autonomous driving, which became real once the industry built the simulation and data systems to show a car could drive itself. At Inner Logic, we are building that layer for all of procedural medicine starting with the way devices are designed and tested. When device makers can develop and prove intelligent systems this way, the quality of a patient’s care stops depending on which hospital they can access or which surgeon is on call,” said Tito Porras, MD, Co-Founder and CEO, Inner Logic.
Inner Logic was co-founded by CEO Tito Porras, MD, who left his neurosurgery residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital to build the company; CTO Mathias Unberath, PhD, an award-winning computer vision and simulation researcher at Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering; and Chief Robotics Officer Axel Krieger, PhD, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering, whose robot performed the first autonomous laparoscopic surgery in a live animal. Together, the founders have authored more than 400 peer-reviewed publications and are named inventors on over 40 patents.
Today, much of the exploratory work in device development still happens in the physical world. Teams build prototypes, test them in cadaver labs or animal studies, and learn what works, one experiment at a time. Each iteration is expensive and covers only a narrow slice of the patients a device will encounter. What one program learns rarely carries into the next.
Inner Logic moves that work into simulation, where device teams can design and test across thousands of virtual patients overnight. Those virtual patients are built from real clinical and procedural data, so what teams learn in simulation holds up in the physical world. For conventional devices like heart valves or catheters, that means iterating across more of the patient population than any cadaver lab could reach. For autonomous systems, that shift is essential: the range of anatomy, imaging conditions, and failure scenarios is too wide for physical testing to cover alone.
“The Inner Logic team’s research has shown that procedural autonomy isn’t a distant vision, it’s nearly here. But getting there requires a fundamental shift: moving development, testing, and evidence generation in silico. We believe the team’s thought leadership at the intersection of AI, medicine, and robotics make them the right ones to build that infrastructure for the industry,” said Reva Nohria, Partner at General Catalyst.
Their approach has already been demonstrated end to end. In orthopedic trauma, the team trained AI algorithms entirely in simulation and deployed them successfully on real hardware and patient anatomy. The team also completed the critical steps of gallbladder removal in a live animal model with no surgeon intervention.
“Inner Logic has the rare combination of both extreme technical talent in world leading robotics and physical AI models, and deep surgical knowledge,” said Caleb Appleton, Partner at Bison Ventures. “Hardware advancements enabled non-incremental improvements in surgery over the last two decades yet hardware improvement is becoming incremental. Embedded intelligence will bring the next wave of fundamental improvements and Inner Logic is leading the way in procedural intelligence.”
About Inner Logic:
Inner Logic is building development infrastructure for procedural devices. Founded by experts in surgical computer vision, robotics, and autonomy, Inner Logic exists so that the quality of a procedural device does not depend on how many cadaver labs or animal studies its manufacturer could afford to run. Device manufacturers use Inner Logic to simulate how devices perform across thousands of virtual patients, grounded in real procedural data, before committing to physical testing. As devices become intelligent and autonomous, the same infrastructure provides the capabilities needed to make surgical autonomy a reality. Inner Logic is based in Baltimore, Maryland.
For more information, please visit: https://semaphorsurgical.com/innerlogic/.
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