🦄 Unicorner Startup of the Week:

Illuminant

✍️ Notes from the Editors

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To start off today’s cover, a look into a past article. Bardeen (covered in July 2022) just announced a $3m strategic investment from Dropbox and Hubspot—a move that, in our eyes, marks the continued (and responsible) adoption of AI agents in the workplace.

With this look back, we’re excited to continue exploring the unique use of emerging tech through the rest of 2024. Illuminant, for example, has applied augmented reality to a relatively daunting world in healthcare: spinal surgeries.

- Arek and Ethan 🦄

Surgical projection technology

Illuminant leverages augmented reality (AR) technology to help surgeons perform safer and more effective spine surgeries. Using CT scan data from patients, Illuminant’s software automatically constructs a model of the patient’s anatomy, which surgeons can project directly onto a patient’s skin during surgery by using its overhead projection device installed in operating rooms. Viewing a patient’s anatomy enables surgeons to make decisions during surgery prior to making incisions, allowing for procedures to be more precise, less invasive, and safer. Beyond automated modeling software and projection technology, Illuminant is also creating smart surgical guidance tools which interact with the projection, dynamically displaying key data to inform surgeons of their tool’s position relative to key anatomic features with millimeter accuracy.

🔗 Check it out: illuminant.ai

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💰 Business Model

Illuminant sells its medical devices and software to health care providers through a recurring revenue model. It charges hospitals an initial fee for the hardware and software, then generates recurring revenue by charging a pay-per-use rate for every procedure in which the technology is utilized. Since Illuminant sells to hospitals, which often avoid high upfront costs for adopting new technology they may or may not often use, this business model allows Illuminant to have frictionless customer acquisition while still generating recurring profit through per-use fees.

📈 Traction and Fundraising

👫 Founders

📖 Founder Story

Eldrick Millares and James Hu were freshman roommates and close friends at Stanford, and first experienced working together through countless problem sets and all-nighters. After Stanford, Hu went on to attend Med School at UC Irvine, where he spent a lot of time understanding the care delivery process in healthcare institutions. Through his surgical rotations, he noticed the massive opportunity to innovate in medicine; specifically, he noticed the lack of data surgeons were operating with and the disconnect between pre-operation plans and procedures in the operating room. He called Millares to catch up, who had worked at a 3D vision startup leveraging LIDAR technology in the meantime. It was then that they realized the massive opportunity to use visualization and modeling techniques in medicine.

💼 Opportunities

🔮 Our Analysis

Recently, spine surgeons have forgone traditional methods in favor of minimally invasive spine surgery (MISS), in which they make minimal incisions and operate directly on the fibers around the spine without affecting nearby muscles. Although MISS has lower pain and faster recovery times, it presents a massive problem for surgeons: the lack of exposed tissue and small incisions means they’re operating with very little visibility. This blindness of surgeons has resulted in ineffective surgeries, with almost 10-40% of patients needing revisions.

Illuminant’s AR solution gives surgeons an almost “X-Ray Vision,” allowing them to operate in a minimally invasive manner while getting all the data they need to operate effectively. While most competitors are VR-based, Illuminant’s embracement of AR technology makes its projectors far cheaper than expensive headset rigs, and the process of modeling patients is frictionless with software being able to automatically generate models based on routine pre-surgery CT scans.

Historically, healthcare providers are slow adopters of innovative technology; however, Illuminant’s product and business model make selling to hospitals significantly easier. Firstly, the increased visibility for surgeons means operations will be more accurate, leading to a lower revision rate. This is a massive selling point for health care providers, as they lose money revising surgeries due to insurance companies not reimbursing revisions. Furthermore, Illuminant’s business model means that it has a low upfront cost, which makes it a lot easier to sell to department heads at hospitals, who are more willing to adopt emerging technology at lower costs. Illuminant, meanwhile, can still make a profit by charging per use, and since hospitals tend to save more than they spend per use, this model allows for predictable recurring revenue streams.

Although Illuminant aspires to scale beyond spinal surgeries specifically, the spinal surgery market is an amazing one for the team to tackle first. Beyond the increasing use of MISS generating a large demand for spinal surgery navigation technology, spinal surgeries themselves are increasing rapidly. Despite the long go-to-market for medical technology companies, Illuminant’s promising product and star team project itself well to give surgeons superpowers in the operating room.

📚 Further reading

Written by Rohan Desai

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