After the patient record, AI moves into the operating room: UNCOVR raises €6 Million

More than 400 million surgical procedures are performed worldwide every year. An increasing share of these operations is fully recorded on video. Yet once the operating room doors close, most of that information remains unused.

This is the paradox Uncovr is aiming to solve. The startup has announced a $7 million funding round, approximately €6 million, led by Index Ventures, with participation from Seedcamp, Frst, No Label Ventures, Entrepreneurs First, and several healthcare and AI-focused angel investors. Already deployed in operating rooms across the United States and Europe, the company has developed a platform capable of automatically analyzing surgical videos to generate operative reports and billing codes.

The problem it addresses is far from marginal. According to data cited by the company, a multi-institutional study covering more than 1,000 cases across 500 healthcare systems found that the majority of operative reports omit over 70% of recommended clinical information. Early deployments of Uncovr’s platform also identified critical procedural steps or billable actions missing from documentation in 16% of analyzed cases, with an average reimbursement gap of approximately 10%.

These documentation shortcomings extend far beyond hospital administration. They affect continuity of care, complicate the analysis of postoperative complications, and reduce the quality of the data available to improve surgical practices.

Uncovr’s initiative illustrates a broader evolution of artificial intelligence in healthcare. The first wave of digitization focused on electronic health records. The second centered on medical imaging and AI-assisted diagnostics. Over the past two years, a third generation of companies has emerged to automate medical documentation using large language models. AI is now beginning to move directly into the medical act itself.

Uncovr’s technology analyzes surgical videos second by second to identify procedures, their sequence, intraoperative events, and decisions made by surgeons. Based on this clinical understanding, the platform automatically generates a structured operative report along with the administrative coding required for reimbursement.

For many investors, surgery now represents what medical imaging did a decade ago: a vast and largely untapped source of data.

The issue is particularly strategic because major surgical robotics companies, led by Intuitive Surgical and its da Vinci system, already control part of the infrastructure through which these data are collected. The competition is no longer limited to robots or software. It increasingly revolves around the ability to build the datasets that will train future generations of surgical assistance systems.

This is likely where the real investment thesis behind Uncovr resides. Automated report generation is the platform’s first visible application. Its longer-term value lies in building a large-scale repository of structured surgical data. Just as text corpora enabled the emergence of large language models, and driving data fueled Tesla’s autonomous systems, operative data could become one of the most strategic assets underpinning the next generation of medical AI.

This perspective also explains Index Ventures’ interest. The firm is not merely backing a hospital productivity tool; it is betting on the emergence of a new infrastructure layer designed to make surgery measurable, analyzable, and ultimately usable by artificial intelligence systems.

The founding team is another differentiating factor. Alongside CEO Ines Iraki is Johann Diep, an ETH Zurich-trained engineer who previously worked on AI systems for the European Space Agency. The project also benefits from the involvement of Professor Eric Vibert, a globally recognized hepatobiliary surgeon and one of the pioneers in the field of surgical data science.

After learning how to manage patient records and interpret medical images, artificial intelligence is now beginning to understand what happens inside the operating room itself. Uncovr’s funding round reflects this new stage. Behind the automation of operative reports lies a broader challenge: building the data infrastructure that could power the next generation of AI-assisted surgery.