YuRui Innovation Secures Tens of Millions in Series A Funding to Advance AI-Driven Minimally Invasive Surgery Solutions

VCBeat has learned that, recently, the emerging smart surgery company and Ruichuangxin announced the completion of their first round of financing, amounting to tens of millions of RMB, with exclusive investment from MARATHON VENTURE PARTNERS.

Yu Rui Innovation has established R&D and operational centers in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, and Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, respectively. The funds from this round will be primarily used to support the continuous research and development of Yu Rui Innovation’s SurgSmart series of intelligent minimally invasive products, expanding their applicability to a broader range of surgical procedures. Meanwhile, the company will actively advance its market expansion across China, aiming to secure a leading position in the global Smart Surgery 4.0 landscape.

“Surgery 1.0 is open surgery, Surgery 2.0 is minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery, Surgery 3.0 is robotic surgery, and Surgery 4.0 is intelligent surgery.”

Current surgical robots on the market serve as an extension of surgeons’ hands, enabling greater dexterity, stability, and precision. However, they lack the ability to perceive and comprehend the surgical procedure, cannot participate in intraoperative decision support, and thus cannot truly become the surgeon’s “Soulmate.”

SurgSmart, the intelligent surgical platform independently developed by Yuchuangxin, adopts artificial intelligence technology in a groundbreaking manner to build a “virtual surgical expert” for clinical and management applications, including “patient-centered”Intelligent Surgical Navigation System"Physician-Centric"Teaching, Training, and Assessment System"Hospital-Centric"Management Evaluation and Cost Monitoring Early Warning SystemSurgSmart, the “Virtual Surgical Expert,” aims to address clinical and management challenges, delivering benefits to patients, physicians, and hospitals alike. It meets the strong demand from all stakeholders for leveraging digital intelligent systems to resolve clinical issues, unlocking a vast market opportunity valued at tens of billions.

SurgSmart Intelligent Surgical Navigation System, built with the core objectives of enhancing surgical efficiency, reducing surgical risks, and improving surgical standardization, is a typical example of an advanced intelligent surgical assistance technology developed based on clinical needs. By leveraging numerous patented clinical technologies, the system employs multimodal integration algorithms during surgery to assist physicians in decision-making, enabling real-time guidance to key anatomical landmarks and alerts on operational safety risk levels. It features comprehensive real-time analysis of surgical procedures and visual enhancement capabilities.

Taking laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC), the most common surgical procedure, as an example, intelligent surgical navigation systems have acquired a rich array of capabilities through learning from thousands of cases. These capabilities include real-time identification of surgical phases, automatic recognition of anatomical structures, assessment of surgical safety via the Critical View of Safety (CVS), guidance on camera holder position and angle, prediction of surgery end time, real-time prediction of upcoming surgical instruments, and tracking of gauze positions. These advancements bring revolutionary progress to the conduct of surgical procedures.

SurgSmart LC Intraoperative Real-Time Navigation Assistance System

The SurgSmart Series, Built on Core Technology for Understanding Surgical ProceduresTeaching, Training, and Assessment SystemandManagement Evaluation and Cost Control SystemBy leveraging intelligent algorithms to unlock the “Black Box” of surgery, which contains a wealth of information, this approach quantifies and interprets intraoperative data. It enables efficient, stable, and accurate postoperative evaluation and analysis of surgical procedures, providing abundant quantitative data that effectively helps surgeons shorten their learning curve and improve the efficiency of case reviews. Meanwhile, it offers data support for hospital management decisions, including quality assessment and cost control.

Left: Teaching Video Library and Review System; Right:AI Surgical Report

“The future direction of surgical development will be visualization, digitization, and intelligence.”With Rui Chuangxin CEO Liu Jiestated, “Our team will continue to deepen its engagement in the smart surgery sector, guided by clinical technology and management needs. We will integrate the ‘Virtual Surgical Expert’ AI system extensively into clinical diagnosis and treatment, education and training, and surgical management, achieving an organic synergy between the ‘Virtual Expert’ and surgeons. Our ultimate goal is to enhance the accessibility of surgical services and standardize treatment quality, thereby benefiting a broad patient population.”

Tang Yinan, Managing Director at MARATHON VENTURE PARTNERSWe believe that the digital surgery track, parallel to the field of surgical robotics, represents a major trend and direction under the broader movement toward intelligent surgery, offering entry-level opportunities. Chinese enterprises are poised to lead the global innovation frontier by leveraging their technological and data advantages. The Rui Team is a pioneer and trailblazer in the industry. Over the past two and a half years, it has breakthroughly built capabilities for structured parsing and multi-dimensional analysis of real-time surgical procedures, and has begun to expand product applications and business models in multiple directions. MARATHON VENTURE PARTNERS is honored to collaborate with this exceptional team, which boasts extensive entrepreneurial experience as well as strong innovation and execution capabilities, to accelerate the digitization and intelligence of surgical care.

MARATHON VENTURE PARTNERS, founded in 2016, is an early-stage venture capital fund focused on the digital health technology sector. It targets early-stage companies in medical devices and equipment with core technologies and innovative business models, precision diagnostics, mobile healthcare and services, and health insurance technology firms. Recent investments include Medxinhui Health (focused on commercial health insurance technology), Shukun Technology (AI-based medical imaging), Xunshi Technology (digital dental solutions), Beideng Medical (a B2B trading platform for medical devices), and Basecare Medical (early cancer screening based on gene sequencing).