The most important introduction in British surgical robotics may have happened in a room full of expectant parents.
According to one account of how CMR Surgical began, Mark Slack's wife struck up a conversation with Luke Hares at antenatal classes. Slack was a surgeon fixated on a stubborn fact about keyhole surgery: far less of it was being done than could be done. Hares was an engineer. The two men got talking, and Hares brought in people he had worked with before in Cambridge: Keith Marshall, Paul Roberts and Martin Frost. Treat the story with care, since it rests on a single profile. But the company it produced is very real.
Their machine, Versius, uses small, separate, modular arms that can be wheeled into any theatre and set up quickly.
In January 2014 they incorporated Cambridge Medical Robotics. Frost has described the aim in simple terms: bring minimal-access surgery to people who do not have it, and in doing so change surgery. Keyhole operations mean smaller cuts and faster recovery, but they are hard on the surgeon, who stands for hours twisting long instruments through tiny holes. A robot could take that strain.
The obvious route was to build another da Vinci. They did not. Their machine, Versius, uses small, separate, modular arms that can be wheeled into any theatre and set up quickly. That mattered for hospitals without a dedicated robotic suite. A surgeon in India told reporters it let him sit at an open console and do six procedures in one day.
Nobody had expected a start-up from a business park outside Cambridge to attract serious money. It did. A $240M round in 2019 made it a unicorn, and in 2021 it raised $600M at a $3bn valuation, which the company called the largest private medtech financing ever. The name changed from Cambridge Medical Robotics to CMR Surgical in 2018, a sign it wanted to sound like a global player.
Then came the price. In April 2023 about 350 staff were made redundant, as investors grew cautious and selling expensive hardware proved slower than the pitch deck. The company kept going with a $165M raise that September and a GBP 10m factory in Ely able to make up to 500 systems a year. The US was always the prize, and FDA clearance for an upgraded Versius finally came in October 2024. In 2025 it raised more than $200M, and the Financial Times reported it was exploring a sale at up to $4bn. No buyer has been confirmed in anything I could find.
There are small, human moments in the numbers too. In 2024 a seven-year-old boy from Gosport became the first child in the UK to have Versius surgery, in an NHS trial. More than 20,000 cases had been completed by March 2024.
The lesson for founders is almost embarrassingly ordinary. The hardest part of this company was not the robot. It was getting five people with the right skills into the same conversation, and then keeping them in it for a decade while the money, and the market, kept moving.