Paris-based startup Uncovr has raised roughly €6 million ($7 million) in seed funding led by Index Ventures, with Seedcamp, Frst, No Label Ventures, Entrepreneurs First and a group of health-and-AI angel investors joining the round, to build a platform that turns raw surgical video into the operative reports and billing codes hospitals currently write by hand. The company's pitch is blunt: the camera already sees everything that happens inside an operating room, yet the official medical record of that procedure is still reconstructed from memory, hours later, by an exhausted surgeon.
Uncovr's software ingests surgical and endoscopic video captured during robotic and minimally invasive procedures and analyzes it to identify the steps performed, their sequence, intraoperative events and decisions made by the surgical team. From that analysis, the platform drafts a structured operative report and suggests procedural and billing codes before the surgeon leaves the operating room. Every output is reviewed and approved by a clinician before it becomes part of the patient's record, according to the company and Index Ventures. Uncovr says it is already deployed in hospitals across the United States and Europe, with a pipeline representing more than 400 operating rooms and thousands of hours of surgical footage analyzed to date.
"At Uncovr, we are taking what actually happens in the operating room and turning it into something that can be reliably captured and used," said Ines Iraki, Uncovr's co-founder and CEO, in a statement published by Index Ventures alongside the funding announcement. "Surgeons should not have to spend their time reconstructing from memory what a camera has already captured and becoming medical coders. The bigger opportunity is what comes after... Surgery has always been learned by watching. We're making that possible at scale."
Martin Mignot, the Index Ventures partner who led the firm's investment, framed the problem in financial terms rather than purely clinical ones. "Surgical documentation is a problem hiding in plain sight – billions are lost each year because the official record of a procedure is written from memory, rather than from what actually happened," Mignot said. "Uncovr is solving this by automating a massive, overlooked, and error-prone workflow." He added that meeting co-founder Iraki, he and his colleagues were "immediately struck by her dynamism, excellence, and speed of execution," and that the team had "found a wedge into one of healthcare's most complex environments" and landed hospital deployments within months of the company's founding.
Uncovr was founded in 2025 by Iraki, engineer Johann Diep and Professor Eric Vibert. Diep, a graduate of ETH Zurich, previously built AI systems for autonomous environments in defense and at the European Space Agency. Vibert is a hepatobiliary surgeon and Chief of Surgery at Assistance Publique–Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP), one of Europe's largest hospital systems, and is described by French outlet FrenchWeb as an internationally recognized pioneer of research into surgical data. According to figures the company cites from a multi-institutional review spanning roughly 500 health systems and more than 1,000 cases, a majority of operative reports omit more than 70% of the clinical information recommended for inclusion. In Uncovr's own early deployments, the company found critical or billable procedural steps missing from documentation in 16% of analyzed cases, corresponding to an average reimbursement gap of about 10% per procedure.
Because the underlying source material is video recorded inside the operating room, Uncovr's approach raises privacy and regulatory questions that text-based documentation tools do not face to the same degree. Surgical footage can capture identifiable patient anatomy, staff conversations and device telemetry, all of which fall under health-data protection rules such as HIPAA in the US and GDPR in Europe, and hospitals piloting the system will need to resolve where video is stored, how long it is retained, and who can access it. Uncovr and its backers have emphasized that a clinician reviews and approves every generated report before submission, a human-in-the-loop design meant to keep accountability with the surgeon rather than the algorithm — though it does not by itself resolve consent and data-governance questions around recording procedures in the first place. Neither Uncovr's public materials nor Index Ventures' announcement cite independent, peer-reviewed validation of the platform's coding accuracy or its downstream effect on complication or readmission rates; those are framed as claims and goals rather than demonstrated outcomes so far.
Why It Matters
Uncovr's raise fits a broader pattern of AI investment moving toward the unglamorous back office of medicine rather than diagnosis itself. Ambient documentation tools such as Abridge, Nuance's Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX) and Corti have already found traction by listening to outpatient visits and drafting clinical notes; studies of DAX-style tools have found reductions in documentation time of roughly 15 to 30 minutes per provider per day, at a time when physicians reportedly spend up to two hours on EHR work for every hour of direct patient care. Uncovr is effectively trying to do for the operating room what those tools do for the exam room, but with a harder problem: video, rather than a conversation, is the input, and the stakes of an inaccurate operative report — for billing, malpractice exposure and continuity of care — are higher than an inaccurate visit summary. Investors are also betting on something beyond documentation. As Index Ventures' Mignot noted, the firm sees structured surgical video as a foundational dataset that could eventually train models for surgical assistance or autonomy, putting Uncovr in competition, or potential partnership, with surgical robotics incumbents like Intuitive Surgical that already sit on large stores of procedure video.
What to Watch
Key signals to track: whether Uncovr publishes independent or peer-reviewed data on coding accuracy and reimbursement recovery rather than internal figures; how hospitals and regulators in the US and EU treat surgical video as a data-retention and consent category distinct from text-based records; whether incumbents in ambient clinical documentation or surgical robotics respond with competing or acquisitive moves; and whether Uncovr's next funding round, or additional hospital deployments beyond its current pipeline of roughly 400 operating rooms, arrives alongside published outcome data rather than founder and investor claims alone.
“Surgeons should not have to spend their time reconstructing from memory what a camera has already captured and becoming medical coders.”— Ines Iraki, Co-founder and CEO, Uncovr