Hong Kong surgical robot start-up Cornerstone Robotics, which competes with rival products such as the da Vinci Surgical System, aims to raise more than 500 million yuan (US$70 million) later this year to expand sales and develop new products, according to its chief.
Since its founding in 2019, the firm had a deliberate strategy to localise parts production, said founder and CEO Samuel Au Kwok-wai. The objective predates the Covid-19 pandemic’s supply chain problems and the US-China trade war, he said.
“To build high-quality, safe and reliable surgical robots, my belief was that we needed to source all components domestically,” he said in an exclusive interview on Thursday on the sidelines of the International Forum for Patient Capital in Hong Kong.
The strategy had allowed Cornerstone to offer performance “equivalent to the state-of-the-art” system in the world at “substantially lower” prices, he said.
