Inner Logic Raises $11.5 Million Seed Round to Build Simulation Infrastructure for Procedural Devices
Inner Logic, formerly known as Semaphor, has announced an $11.5 million seed round co-led by General Catalyst and Bison Ventures, with participation from J2VP, Defined, PTX, Valia Ventures, Page One, Alumni Ventures, and Flare. The Maryland-based company is building infrastructure that gives device manufacturers the ability to design, test, and validate procedural devices across thousands of virtual patients and procedures before clinical deployment, with the same infrastructure intended to enable surgical autonomy.
The company was co-founded by CEO Tito Porras, MD, who left his neurosurgery residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital to build the company; CTO Mathias Unberath, PhD, an award-winning computer vision and simulation researcher at Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering; and Chief Robotics Officer Axel Krieger, PhD, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering, whose robot performed the first autonomous laparoscopic surgery in a live animal. Together, the founders have authored more than 400 peer-reviewed publications and are named inventors on over 40 patents.
Currently, much of the exploratory work in device development still happens in the physical world, with teams building prototypes and testing them in cadaver labs or animal studies. Each iteration is expensive and covers only a narrow slice of the patients a device will encounter, with limited transfer of learning between programs. Inner Logic moves that work into simulation, where device teams can design and test across thousands of virtual patients built from real clinical and procedural data, ensuring that what teams learn in simulation holds up in the physical world. For conventional devices like heart valves or catheters, that means iterating across more of the patient population than any cadaver lab could reach. For autonomous systems, the range of anatomy, imaging conditions, and failure scenarios is too wide for physical testing to cover alone.
Tito Porras, MD, Co-Founder and CEO of Inner Logic, said surgery is on the same path as autonomous driving, which became real once the industry built the simulation and data systems to demonstrate a car could drive itself. He noted that Inner Logic is building that layer for procedural medicine, starting with how devices are designed and tested, so that when device makers can develop and prove intelligent systems this way, the quality of a patient’s care stops depending on which hospital they can access or which surgeon is on call.
Reva Nohria, Partner at General Catalyst, said the Inner Logic team’s research has shown that procedural autonomy is not a distant vision but is nearly here, and that getting there requires a fundamental shift of moving development, testing, and evidence generation in silico. She added that the team’s thought leadership at the intersection of AI, medicine, and robotics makes them the right ones to build that infrastructure for the industry.
Caleb Appleton, Partner at Bison Ventures, said Inner Logic has the rare combination of both extreme technical talent in world-leading robotics and physical AI models, and deep surgical knowledge. He noted that hardware advancements enabled non-incremental improvements in surgery over the last two decades, but hardware improvement is becoming incremental, and embedded intelligence will bring the next wave of fundamental improvements with Inner Logic leading the way in procedural intelligence.
The approach has already been demonstrated end to end. In orthopedic trauma, the team trained AI algorithms entirely in simulation and deployed them successfully on real hardware and patient anatomy. The team also completed the critical steps of gallbladder removal in a live animal model with no surgeon intervention.
