Chiefy, a surgical collaboration app, recently announced that it has raised $4.2 million in seed funding, with LionBird leading the round and Nina Capital and Emerge Ventures also participating. The platform provides a chat and communication tool that enables surgical teams to hold pre-operation briefings virtually, removing the need for in-person meetings or communication through text messages, emails, and phone calls. The app is designed to enhance surgical quality by facilitating huddles, brief meetings that enable the team to share information and discuss the surgical plan, which can improve patient care and surgeon satisfaction. Chiefy aims to enable more providers to participate in the huddle by adopting an asynchronous and digital approach.
The company plans to use the funds to accelerate product development and acquire new health system and hospital customers. Maya Ber Lerner, Chiefy’s CEO and co-founder, stated that the app was created to challenge the notion that high-quality healthcare requires a slow process or for clinicians to suffer. The company believes that quality, efficiency, and clinician experience can coexist and even enhance one another, resulting in a win-win-win. Lerner also mentioned that building a culture of trust was critical, and the app serves as a tool to enable this culture.
Proximie is another digital surgery company that operates in the same space, offering a platform that enables surgeons to record procedures and lets outside surgeons virtually scrub in. The company also promotes its app as a means of improving surgical quality. In 2021, Proximie raised $80 million and was selected for Amazon Web Services’ latest healthcare accelerator.
PrecisionOS is a virtual reality platform that offers surgical training and planning. Its InVisionOS tool, which creates a 3D construction of a patient’s CT scan that can be viewed or manipulated before the operation, received FDA 510(k) clearance in late 2021. Several companies are using virtual reality for surgical training and assessment, such as Osso VR, which raised $66 million last year, and FundamentalVR, which raised $20 million in 2022.