Uncovr Raises €6M to Transform Surgical AI Records

Uncovr Raises €6 Million to Fix Surgery's Biggest Blind Spot: The Missing Clinical Record

Every year, more than 400 million surgical procedures are performed across the globe. A growing number of those operations are conducted using robotic and minimally invasive techniques, all of which generate rich, real-time video footage of what unfolds inside the operating room. Yet despite this wealth of captured data, the official record of most surgical procedures is still written from memory — reconstructed by a fatigued surgeon hours after the event, squeezed between back-to-back cases, often working without so much as a timestamped reference. It is a striking paradox at the heart of modern medicine: some of the most technologically advanced procedures on the planet are still being documented like field notes from a different era.

That contradiction is precisely what Paris-based startup Uncovr was built to resolve. The company, which uses artificial intelligence to automatically generate operative reports and procedural coding directly from surgical and endoscopic video, has just announced the close of a €6 million (approximately $7 million) Seed funding round. The raise, which brings together some of the most respected names in European and global venture capital, marks a significant moment not just for Uncovr but for the broader field of surgical AI — and signals that investors are paying close attention to a corner of healthcare that has long been overlooked by the technology sector.

At The AI World, we cover the stories that reflect how artificial intelligence is genuinely reshaping the world in which we live — not just in research labs or product roadmaps, but in the places where the stakes are highest. This story is one of those. It is about a technology that sits at the intersection of patient safety, hospital efficiency, medical reimbursement, and the future of how surgical knowledge is preserved and transmitted. And it begins with a problem that is far more serious than most people outside the operating room would ever imagine.

The Operating Room Data Gap: A Structural Problem Hidden in Plain Sight

When a surgeon completes a procedure, the official account of what happened does not come from the video system recording the operation. It comes from the surgeon's own memory. The operative report — the legal and clinical document that captures what was done, how it was done, and what was found — is typically dictated or typed hours after the event, often at the end of a long day, with no structured reference to the footage that exists. This is not a matter of negligence or poor practice. It is simply the way the system has always worked, and the consequences of this gap have quietly compounded over decades.

The implications stretch well beyond administrative inconvenience. That operative report becomes the foundation for everything that follows: billing and reimbursement, compliance audits, future clinical decisions, continuity of care across providers, and the legal record of what transpired during the procedure. When the report is inaccurate, incomplete, or simply missing critical detail, the downstream effects are real and measurable. A multi-institutional study examining more than 1,000 surgical cases across 500 health systems found that the majority of operative reports fail to capture at least 70 percent of the recommended clinical information. That is not a minor shortfall — it is a structural failure that has direct, demonstrable links to higher rates of post-surgical infection, patient readmission, and the need for reoperation.

Dr. Prakash Gatta, Medical Director of Complex Foregut Surgery at Texas Health Resources and VP of Clinical and Medical Affairs at Uncovr, describes the problem with clarity that comes from years of lived experience inside operating rooms. When reviewing actual surgical cases, the gaps between what physically occurred during a procedure and what ended up in the clinical record were consistently evident. And as he points out, the consequences are not limited to paperwork. Documentation gaps directly affect reimbursement integrity, clinical security, and the ability of subsequent care teams to understand exactly what a patient underwent. It is, in his words, not a marginal issue but a structural gap in how surgery is documented today.

The financial dimension of this problem is equally significant. Uncovr's own real-world analysis of its deployed cases found that billable procedural steps were missed in 16 percent of procedures, resulting in an average reimbursement gap of approximately 10 percent — driven entirely by documentation failures that standard human review had not caught. For large health systems performing thousands of procedures each year, the cumulative financial impact of that gap is considerable. But more importantly, when documentation is incomplete, patients are the ones who bear the risk.

How Uncovr Turns Surgical Video Into a Verified Clinical Record

Uncovr's technology addresses this problem at its source. Rather than asking surgeons to reconstruct what happened from memory, the platform analyses the surgical or endoscopic video captured during the procedure itself — the only true ground-truth record of what actually took place — and uses that analysis to automatically generate structured operative reports and accurate procedural codes.

This is not a simple transcription task. It requires the system to understand what is happening in the video at each moment: identifying anatomical structures, recognising the instruments being used, understanding the sequence of steps in a given procedure, and translating all of that into the precise clinical and billing language that hospitals and insurers require. To do this at the level of accuracy that clinical deployment demands requires deep expertise across multiple disciplines — computer vision, surgical knowledge, clinical documentation standards, and medical coding.

The platform integrates with intraoperative workflow data alongside the video feed, meaning it captures not just what the camera sees but the broader context of how a procedure unfolds in real time. The result is a clinical record that is grounded in verified, time-stamped visual evidence rather than recollection. That shift, from memory-based documentation to evidence-based documentation, improves accuracy across every downstream use case: patient care, reimbursement integrity, regulatory compliance, and continuity between care teams.

Ines Iraki, co-founder and CEO of Uncovr, articulates the vision with a directness that reflects both the urgency of the problem and the scale of the opportunity she sees beyond it. Surgeons should not be spending their time reconstructing from memory what a camera has already captured. But more than the immediate documentation challenge, Iraki sees something larger at stake. Every robotic and minimally invasive procedure already generates a rich record of expert decision-making, technique, and clinical judgment. That body of video data, if properly structured and made searchable, has the potential to become one of the most valuable datasets in the history of medicine — the foundation for how surgical knowledge gets transmitted and applied at scale across institutions, training programmes, and future AI systems. Surgery has always been learned by watching. Uncovr is making that possible on a scale that was never previously achievable.

A Seed Round Built on Serious Conviction

The €6 million Seed round was led by Index Ventures, one of Europe's most established and globally respected venture capital firms, with a portfolio spanning Figma, Roblox, Wise, and dozens of other category-defining technology companies. Joining Index in the round are Seedcamp, Frst, No Label Ventures, and Entrepreneurs First — a lineup that reflects both the breadth of European deep-tech investment and the confidence that experienced operators are placing in Uncovr's approach.

The round also includes a set of angel investors whose backgrounds speak directly to the problem Uncovr is solving. Jean Nehme, founder of Digital Surgery, which was acquired by medical technology giant Medtronic, brings firsthand experience of building and scaling AI tools in the surgical environment. Othman Laraki, CEO of Color Health, contributes perspective from the frontier of health data and genomics. Charlie Songhurst, a board member at Meta, adds a dimension of broader technology and governance experience. Together, these individuals represent a group of backers who understand the complexity of operating inside healthcare, and who clearly see Uncovr's technology as something more than a point solution.

Martin Mignot, Partner at Index Ventures, summarised the investment rationale in terms that cut to the heart of what makes Uncovr unusual. The founding team has done something rare: earned genuine adoption inside one of healthcare's most demanding and difficult environments, and moved at extraordinary speed once inside. By structuring what happens in the operating room, Uncovr is building something that extends well beyond a documentation tool — it is assembling a highly valuable dataset for the broader future of surgical AI. That framing matters, because it reveals how the most sophisticated investors are thinking about the long-term value of what Uncovr is creating. The operative reports and procedural data generated by the platform are not just administrative outputs. They are structured, verified, time-stamped records of expert surgical performance — the raw material from which future AI systems, training programmes, and clinical research can be built.

The Team: Where Surgery Meets Space-Age AI

The story of how Uncovr came to exist is, in its own way, as interesting as the technology itself. The company was founded in 2025 by three people whose backgrounds, taken individually, might seem unrelated — but whose combined experience maps almost precisely onto the problem they are trying to solve.

Ines Iraki, the CEO, spent time embedded in operating rooms while working in healthcare, and became fascinated by the gap between what surgical systems were technically capable of capturing and what hospitals were actually managing to use. That gap was not, she came to understand, a technology problem in the conventional sense. The cameras and recording systems already existed. The problem was that no one had built the intelligence layer capable of turning what was on those recordings into something clinically and administratively useful. Johann Diep, the CTO, brings a background that might surprise those unfamiliar with how frontier AI is developing. He previously built AI systems for autonomous environments in both defence applications and at the European Space Agency — contexts in which AI must perform reliably under conditions of high consequence, with no margin for error. That background in mission-critical autonomous systems translates directly into the demands of clinical AI, where reliability and accuracy are non-negotiable. Professor Eric Vibert, the Medical Co-Founder, is Chief of Surgery at AP-HP, one of the largest hospital groups in Europe, and brings decades of experience confronting the clinical consequences of incomplete operative reporting at the sharp end of surgical practice.

The team that has assembled around these three founders reflects the same multi-disciplinary seriousness. Engineers, surgeons, and medical coders from ETH Zurich, École Polytechnique, AP-HP, Mayo Clinic, HEC Paris, and Texas Health Resources/Texas Christian University have come together in an organisation that operates across both Paris and New York. With a pipeline already encompassing 400 operating rooms and thousands of hours of analysed surgical footage, Uncovr is not a company at the theoretical stage. It is a company that is already deployed, already generating real-world data, and already demonstrating measurable impact in live clinical environments.

Uncovr and the Larger Healthcare AI Movement in Europe

Uncovr's raise does not exist in isolation. It sits within a broader and accelerating pattern of European investment into AI tools designed to address specific operational failures across the healthcare system — and the momentum behind this wave of funding reflects both the scale of the problems being targeted and the maturity of the technology now available to address them.

Across Europe and beyond, investors have been putting significant capital behind companies that use AI to reduce administrative burden on clinical staff, improve the quality of clinical documentation, enhance diagnostic imaging, and streamline hospital workflow. The underlying logic connecting all of these investments is the same: healthcare systems are generating more data than they have ever generated before, and the gap between the data being produced and the data being used is both a problem and an opportunity of extraordinary proportion. Uncovr's specific focus on surgical video analysis places it at a particularly compelling intersection of those themes. Unlike many healthcare AI applications that work with structured data — lab results, imaging scans, patient records — Uncovr works with unstructured, real-time video data and transforms it into structured, verified, actionable clinical records. That is technically demanding, and the fact that the company has demonstrated real-world deployment at this early stage suggests the team has found a genuinely viable path through those challenges.

There is also a broader philosophical point worth making, one that Iraki herself has articulated. The structured surgical records that Uncovr creates do not just solve today's documentation problem. They are building the foundation for a future in which surgical knowledge can be codified, searched, compared, and applied across institutions and borders in ways that have never previously been possible. When a senior surgeon performs a complex procedure, their technique, decision-making, and clinical judgment are currently locked inside the memory of the people who were present in the room. Uncovr is building the infrastructure to change that — to make surgical expertise something that can be captured, structured, and transmitted at scale. For medical education, for clinical benchmarking, for the development of the next generation of AI-assisted surgical tools, that is a foundation of potentially transformative significance.

The operating room has been one of the last environments in modern medicine to be meaningfully touched by the data revolution that has reshaped so many other parts of healthcare. Uncovr, with its newly secured funding and a team that combines clinical authority, technical depth, and genuine operator experience, is making a serious and well-supported attempt to change that. The AI World will be watching closely as this story develops — because if Uncovr delivers on the vision its founders have articulated, the implications for patients, surgeons, and healthcare systems worldwide will be profound.