XRlabs has raised $8.4M in seed funding led by Playground Global, with Eka Ventures joining, to expand a surgical AI layer that runs on top of operating room equipment rather than replacing it.
The London company, founded by practicing neurosurgeon Dr. Ali Haddad, makes modular software that fuses live surgical video, navigation telemetry and pre-operative CT and MRI scans into one anatomy-aware view during an operation. It has run on 4K 3D surgical scopes and interfaced with navigation systems across more than one hundred cases on three continents.
No rip and replace
That device-agnostic design is the commercial pitch. Hospitals are not asked to buy a new tower or a new scope; the software reads what the room already produces and turns it into real-time guidance for the surgical team.
The company also named Omar Ishrak as chair of its board. Ishrak led Medtronic as chairman and CEO from 2011 to 2020, previously chaired Intel’s board, and sits on the boards of Amgen and Cleveland Clinic, giving XRlabs a route into large device and health system relationships.
Regulatory runway and compute
Proceeds will fund engineering and clinical hiring, regulatory work in the UK, Europe and the United States, and evidence building with partner institutions. XRlabs has also been awarded a compute allocation on the UK AI Research Resource, a national AI compute service.
Playground Global general partner Bruce Leak framed the bet around lived experience. The best physical AI companies, he said, come from founders who have faced a problem in their own field. For Haddad, that field is the operating room, where surgery generates extraordinary data that rarely becomes intelligence when it counts.
