Hong Kong surgical robot start-up Cornerstone eyes funds to take on da Vinci

Company aims to raise US$70 million to develop its systems, which it claims rival the market-leading da Vinci units at lower cost

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A robotic surgical system from start-up Cornerstone Robotics on display at the Leap technology conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on March 5, 2024. Photo: Matt Haldane

Published: 12:30pm, 26 May 2025Updated: 3:46pm, 26 May 2025

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.

“People often talk about supply chain resilience to handle import tariffs between the US and China,” he said at the event, hosted by government-owned Hong Kong Investment Corporation. “But six years ago, we already decided that we needed to control the entire supply chain.”

The company is based in the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park. Its more than 200 engineers work closely with suppliers near its 150,000 sq ft plant in the Longhua district of Shenzhen to custom-build components for its robot systems, which typically have around 13,000 parts, he said. The plant can build about 200 systems a year.

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.

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