This article has been published in partnership with Kalaari Capital.
Dr Sunil Kumar Venkatappa hears the same question almost every day. After the diagnosis and the surgery date, patients invariably ask, “How soon can I get back to work?” Seeing nearly a hundred patients each week, he knows that successful surgery is only part of the journey; an equally important part is helping patients understand what recovery and life after the surgery will look like and reassuring them that returning to their lives as quickly and safely as possible is within reach.
“Especially when a patient is the sole breadwinner, they’re often reluctant to get admitted. Even if they’re in significant pain, they’re thinking about the income their family depends on. Every day away from work affects their livelihood,” says Dr Venkatappa, Assistant Professor of General Surgery at Bangalore Medical College and Research Institute, who also performs minimally invasive and bariatric surgery at Victoria Hospital, Bengaluru. Patients often weigh the outcome of a much-needed surgery against the source of livelihood they stand to lose. More often than doctors would like, the source wins.
Done the old way, these operations could once have meant a week or more in hospital. And the patient has to live with a large abdominal scar to constantly remind them of this ordeal “Now, though I perform bariatric surgery, which is quite complex… only one or two days is now the current standard,” he says, “And the fact that these surgeries are now becoming virtually scarless is a strong add-on”
He reassures his patients that they will likely get safely discharged the next morning. Some do not believe him. “For them, one-day discharge and getting back to their lives in weeks instead of months, a surgery with no scars and low postoperative pain, is magic.”
That disbelief says less about medicine than about how rarely most Indian patients get to experience this kind of recovery.
Why robotic surgery remains out of reach for most Indians
Nearly 70 percent of surgeries in India are still performed as open procedures, involving larger incisions, longer recovery periods, and more time away from work and family. Robotic surgery, which can significantly reduce recovery time and improve the patient’s quality of life in complex procedures, accounts for less than 1 percent of surgeries nationwide. Of India’s roughly 70,000 hospitals, fewer than 300 have an active surgical robotic system, and only around 2,000 surgeons in the country have been trained to use one.
Cost is one of the biggest reasons. Existing robotic surgical systems can cost Rs 12–20 crore, along with significant annual maintenance and consumable costs that run into lakhs per surgery, making them inaccessible to most hospitals. The technology also requires specialised infrastructure, with many systems requiring operating theatres designed around them.
While cost and infrastructure are major problems, it is not the only one plaguing the surgical ecosystem in the country. Surgeons operating with the help of Surgical robots require extensive hands-on training. This training currently remains heavily gatekept through proprietary simulators tied to specific manufacturers. This means surgeons only get trained after their hospital purchases a specific robotic system.
The result is a technology whose benefit is accessible by only a few.
A childhood of dinner-table surgery talk
Saurya grew up in Cuttack in a family where healthcare was never far from conversation. His father is a neurosurgeon, his mother a scientist whose focus areas are genetics and microbiology, while his sister is an ophthalmologist.
Dinner table conversations were less about mundane everyday things and more about procedures, difficult cases, medical technology and everything in between.
His understanding of healthcare was also shaped by what he observed beyond his home. SCB Medical College and Hospital, one of India’s oldest and largest government hospitals, was a familiar presence in the city where His formative years had shaped
“I grew up witnessing the ground realities of the healthcare system of the country, especially in smaller towns. Overflowing wards, insufficient critical care and overworked doctors and surgeons,” Saurya says.
Those experiences became more than memories; they became a mission. Years later, when he began building surgical technology, he started not with the robot, but with the people it was meant to serve
“If you really have to create some great technology,” Saurya says, “you have to do it for these people… something that is accessible to everyone.”
“Technology is only as powerful as the number of people it can reach,” Saurya says. “If you’re going to create something truly great, it has to be built for everyone, not just a privileged few.”
The instinct to build, however, came much earlier. At seven, Saurya took apart his grandfather’s mechanical alarm clock and spent years, on and off, trying to put it back together, imperfectly succeeding at 12.
Healthcare was a constant presence in his childhood, but his earliest fascination was with understanding how things worked. Physics was his first love, and by the time he finished school, he had earned several scholarships for young scientists. His plan was straightforward: study science. His mother had a different idea.
“Go and sit for the IIT exam. Then you can decide what you want to do next,” he remembers her saying.
He took the exam, earned admission to IIT Kharagpur, and found himself among thousands of students building race cars, drones, and robots long after classes had ended. Immersed in that culture of making and experimentation, his passion for physics gradually evolved into a love for engineering.
At 23, while working at Philips, he built his first X-ray machine. Its first installation was in a small village in China, and its first patient was an 18-month-old child.
“I still have that image with me,” Saurya says. “I keep it close because it reminds me what’s really at stake.”
Looking back, he sees that moment as more than a professional milestone. It was the first time something he had built became part of someone’s care, the first time engineering met its true purpose in improving a patient’s life.
Choosing purpose over predictability
Seven years at Philips gave Saurya a front-row seat to the scale and complexity of medical technology, while his time at a robotics startup taught him what it took to build a company from the ground up.
But the question that had stayed with him since childhood never really went away. He had seen patients delay treatment because they couldn’t afford to stop working, hospitals struggling to access advanced technology, and surgeons stretched beyond capacity trying to serve as many as they could. As robotic surgery continued to transform outcomes in a handful of well-funded hospitals, he couldn’t ignore the widening gap between what was technologically possible and what was practically accessible. The answer, he believed, wasn’t to import innovation — it was to build it.
“I wanted to bring together robotics and surgery to create something that would genuinely serve the people of this country,” he says. That conviction became the foundation of Articulus Surgical: a company built on the belief that world-class surgical technology should be engineered for the realities of India’s healthcare system, not just its most privileged institutions.
Building what wasn’t there
Saurya wasn’t trying to build another surgical robot. He was challenging a belief that had quietly shaped modern healthcare: that the best technology belongs in the biggest hospitals, the wealthiest institutions, and the largest cities. If robotic surgery was ever going to reach the people who needed it most, the solution couldn’t be a robot alone. It required building an entire ecosystem to bridge that divide, from how surgeons are trained and how hospitals adopt robotics to how advanced surgical care could become practical across India’s healthcare system.
That also meant rethinking the technology itself. Surgical robotics is among the most complex engineering challenges in healthcare, and making it truly accessible demanded more than incremental improvements. It required reinventing the technology from the ground up to build systems that could deliver the same levels of precision, safety, and clinical confidence at nearly one-fifth the cost. For Articulus, the ambition wasn’t simply to build a more affordable robot; it was to prove that world-class surgical robotics could be fundamentally re-engineered for accessibility without compromising the engineering excellence, precision, or clinical integrity that define the technology.
That became the idea behind Articulus. The company was not trying to build just another robot, but the seamless ecosystem around it. The name Articulus comes from articulation, the coming together of separate parts to create movement, and reflects the company’s approach both literally and metaphorically- connecting technology, training, and access.
Its first product, Nebula, addresses one of the biggest gaps in robotic surgery: surgeon training. Unlike most simulators tied to a specific robot manufacturer, Nebula lets surgeons train their psychomotor and clinical skills. The system is designed to be used both by surgical students and trainees as well as experienced surgeons looking to refresh and hone their skills.
Articulus’s second product, Galaxi, is one of the most unique approaches to surgical robotics. It is a semi-robotic system that allows laparoscopic surgeons to perform semi-robotic procedures where the camera control is handled by the robot. This reduces the workload in the OR, thereby freeing up valuable surgical personnel. Galaxi is also a key stepping stone for surgeons and hospitals entering into the surgical robotic domain.
And finally, Articulus’s flagship product, the Pulsar, a fully robotic soft tissue surgical robotic system, is designed to provide surgeons with the precision, dexterity, and control to perform a wide range of surgical procedures — from the common to the complex. This system is expected to be 5 times more affordable than most surgical robots.
Affordability extends beyond the robot itself. With consumable costs per surgery engineered to be significantly lower than current industry standards, the overall cost of each procedure is reduced, improving the long-term economics of robotic surgery for hospitals while making advanced surgical care more affordable for patients.
Training the next generation
At KIMS, Bhubaneswar, Dr Ashok Kumar Badamali has been training doctors and surgeons at their simulation centre. Simulation allows healthcare professionals to practice procedures repeatedly until they achieve perfection. While simulation training was fairly common for manual procedures, training simulators for surgical robotics was quite uncommon.
“Surgery is rapidly moving from manual intervention to robotic intervention. The need of the hour is to train students of surgery in both laparoscopy and robotic systems,” he says. “India needs 10 times the number of robotic surgeons we have now in the next 5 years.”
For Dr Badamali, the biggest advantage is simple: surgeons can make mistakes and learn from them over and over again in a simulator without endangering patients.
India first, by choice
In February 2026, Articulus raised a seed round led by Kalaari Capital, with participation from notable angels including Gaurav Agarwal of Innvolution Healthcare and Sandeep Daga of Nine Rivers Capital. Articulus’s commitment to indigenisation, its focus on solving some of the toughest problems in healthcare, and the founder’s relentless perseverance are what brought the investors and Articulus together.
It is a shared conviction between the company and its investors that the future of surgical intervention for the 5 billion people worldwide who still lack access to safe, affordable surgical care will be defined in India, by technology leaders with a strong ecosystem approach and deep industry insight.
Beyond the breakthrough
Every generation is remembered for the technologies it creates. But the technologies that endure are rarely those that are simply the most advanced; they are the ones built with the clearest sense of purpose.
Articulus is betting that the future of surgical robotics will be defined not only by extraordinary engineering, but by an equally ambitious belief: that the best technology should expand possibility, not exclusivity.
That belief was never Articulus’s alone. It is shared by surgeons like Dr Sunil, who saw what these systems could mean for the patients in front of him long before the market did; by trainers like Dr Badamali, who understood that a robot is only as transformative as the hands it is placed in; and by a widening circle across Indian healthcare — clinicians, educators, hospital leaders — who have concluded that access and excellence were never opposites to begin with.
Because in the end, the defining question is not merely what we are capable of building, but why we build it in the first place.
