Avail Medsystems, a Palo Alto-based US startup, is promising a better way for managing operating-room crowding in the age of Covid. The company is growing its fleet of “procedural telemedicine” consoles, a high-end Zoom-like service for the operating room that allows surgeons performing live procedures to collaborate with long-distance viewers following via a tablet or laptop.
Both medical-device makers and investors are warming up to the product. In Avail’s latest Series B fundraiser, expected to be announced later on Wednesday, billionaire Dan Sundheim’s D1 Capital Partners pumped US$100mil into the medical technology company with participation from technology-focused firms 8VC, and repeat investors Lux Capital, Sonder Capital and others. The vote of confidence from D1, a high-profile fund, comes a few months after Avail closed a US$25mil Series A in March.
“We price this so it’s cheaper than to deploy somebody in person,” Hawkins said. “We have tiered rates for the time. One-hundred thousand minutes, a million minutes, and so forth. It’s not at all inconceivable that an Abbott or a J&J would buy 10 million minutes.” That’s allowed fewer people to be in the operating room at any given moment. Nicholson is an avid user of the service. Working from home, equipped only with his iPad, he has advised surgeons with lesser experience how to do complicated procedure, such as threading a catheter through a patient’s arm into the heart’s main valve to improve blood flow.