Gauss Surgical Secures $12.6 Million in Funding to Advance Real-Time Surgical Blood Loss Monitoring Platform

Gauss Surgical, headquartered in Los Altos, California, has secured $12.6 million in a new round of financing. The company’s product is a mobile application that provides real-time monitoring of blood loss during surgical procedures. This funding round was led by Providence Ventures and the Providence Health & Services fund, with participation from Jump Capital. Promus Ventures, LifeForce Ventures, Summation Health Ventures, and the Stanford-StartX Fund also participated in the investment. Following this round, Gauss Surgical has raised a total of $24.6 million.

A Stanford-Born Project: Engineers Step into the Frontlines of Healthcare

Gauss Surgical announced that in December 2015, the Board of Directors appointed Siddarth Satish, the company’s CTO and co-founder, as the new CEO, while former CEO Milton McColl assumed the role of Chairman of the Board.

“When I was working on design-related projects at Stanford University, ideas for new ventures kept emerging; our company’s project was selected from thousands of such concepts,” said Satish. “I was a trained engineer who had never been exposed to operating rooms, blood, or organs. Participating in this project gave me my first glimpse into what a real operating room looks like. During our student years, we were taught to focus on people’s needs themselves, rather than on the methods for addressing those needs. As my co-founders and I examined the myriad of complex needs, one issue captured our attention: in surgical procedures, a patient’s blood loss is a critical factor. At that time, The Joint Commission mandated that every surgical operating room be equipped with an Estimated Blood Loss (EBL) measurement device. This was the only significant development at the time that underscored the importance of blood loss in surgery.”



The project has received FDA clearance and can be used on iPad to monitor patients' blood loss in real time during surgery.

In 2012, Satish participated in Stanford University’s StartX accelerator program and began developing an app designed to measure blood loss during surgical procedures.

Gauss Surgical offers an application called Triton to surgeons and their teams. The product received FDA clearance in 2014. After launching the app on an iPad, the device’s camera estimates a patient’s blood loss based on the amount of blood absorbed by surgical sponges and the total number of sponges used. Real-time blood loss data can be recorded and uploaded to the cloud, enabling physicians to perform diagnostic analyses. Once historical blood loss data is uploaded to the cloud, preoperative predictions of potential blood loss and hemoglobin loss can be made. The app displays the user’s blood loss volume, hemoglobin loss, and the number of surgical sponges used.



Multiple companies have partnered with Gauss Surgical, which will focus more on the fields of obstetrics and burn care.

Currently, institutions such as HackensackUMC, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the MemorialCare Health System, and UC Irvine Medical Center are already using Gauss Surgical’s Triton application.

“This financing will be used to strengthen the company’s sales force,” said Satish. “We believe this is a sound strategy, with a particular focus on obstetrics and burn surgery. Data we have collected in the past demonstrate that these two areas have a substantial impact on the healthcare sector. In obstetric surgery, many scientists have recommended developing methods to estimate intraoperative blood loss; this is an imperative need in every delivery, which greatly motivates us. This represents a collaboration among the medical community, the scientific community, and emerging technologies. This is the area we truly intend to prioritize.”