XRlabs raises $8.4M seed to put AI co-pilots in the operating room
What's the deal? London-based XRlabs has raised $8.4 million in seed funding led by Playground GlobalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, with participation from Eka VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. The company builds device-agnostic software that embeds real-time AI into the operating room, acting as a co-pilot for surgical teams without replacing existing hospital equipment.
What's the endgame? Founded by practicing neurosurgeon Ali Haddad, XRlabs uses computer vision and deep learning to turn live surgical video into real-time intelligence. Its platform runs on 4K 3D surgical scopes and fuses navigation data with pre-operative CT and MRI scans into a single anatomy-aware view.
The company says its platform has been used in more than 100 cases across three continents. Its most notable proof point: a role in designing patient-specific skull implants for the 2025 separation of craniopagus twins in Abu Dhabi, a major multidisciplinary effort documented by BBC NewsDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →.
Who's steering it? Alongside the round, XRlabs named Omar Ishrak as chair of its board. Ishrak led MedtronicDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → as chairman and chief executive officer from 2011 to 2020, and has chaired Intel's board and sat on those of Amgen and Cleveland Clinic — signalling an effort to pair its clinical ambitions with medtech scale-up experience.
Where the money goes? XRlabs plans to grow its engineering and clinical teams, advance the platform through regulatory pathways in the UK, Europe, and the US, and expand its clinical evidence base. The company has also secured a compute allocation on the UK AI Research Resource, the country's national AI compute infrastructure.
"Our conviction is that the operating room is the next frontier for physical AI," said Haddad, chief executive officer of XRlabs. "Surgery generates extraordinary data, yet almost none of it becomes intelligence in the moments that matter most."
What could go wrong? The gap between striking clinical demonstrations and deployable products is wide. XRlabs' own site says its surgical-planning tools remain in research and development and are not commercially available, so the round marks a step toward development — not proof of hospital adoption.
The signal: At $8.4 million, the round sits in the top 2% of all UK seed rounds in 3D technology on record, an early but sizeable bet on merging AI, mixed reality, and surgical data. "The best physical AI companies come from people who've experienced a problem in their field firsthand," said Bruce Leak, general partner at Playground Global — a framing that captures where investors now see the surgical software market heading.
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Image credit: Generated with Gemini
