Exclusive: Bionaut Labs raises an extension round in preparation for micro-robot clinical trials

Fortune Ā· (Robyn Beckā€”AFP/Getty Images)

Have you ever seen the movie Fantastic Voyage? I hadnā€™t, but everyone I talked to at or around medical micro-robots startup Bionaut Labs kept telling me I had to.

Once I watched it, I saw whyā€”the movie, released in 1966 and starring Raquel Welch, is about a futuristic technology allowing people to shrink down, so tiny that they can enter the human body to do surgery. The movie may be psychedelic and far-fetched, but if Bionaut has its way, that future is imminent (sort of).

Bionaut is building micro-robots that precisely deliver drugs to hard-to-reach areas in the human brain. The companyā€™s goal is to build ā€œan elegant solutionā€¦that can reach places in the body we previously just couldnā€™t go,ā€ said Bionaut CEO and cofounder Michael Shpigelmacher.

So far, the companyā€™s animal testing has been successful, and Bionaut has now raised more cash in anticipation of what will be the companyā€™s biggest challenge yet: human clinical trials later this year.

Fortune can exclusively report that Bionautā€™s raised an extension round, which involved the Mayo Clinic, along with existing investors Khosla Ventures, Upfront Ventures, and OurCrowd. Fortune has also learned that Bill Gatesā€™ Gates Ventures has invested, per two sources familiar with the matter. (A Gates Ventures representative didnā€™t return two requests for comment.)

To date, Bionaut has raised over $70 million, Fortune can confirm. In 2022, the company closed its Series B, led by Khosla, bringing the total the company had raised by then to $63.2 million, according to Crunchbase. Bionaut declined to disclose valuation.

Bionautā€™s micro-robot is about the size of a grain of rice and is meant to move through the human bodyā€™s bloodstream and tissue to deliver drugs far more accurately than we can today. The micro-robot is controlled through magnetismā€”Bionautā€™s scientists and engineers move the robot through the body by tweaking the electromagnetic field.

"We think that this paradigm that we're bringing in time could spawn a whole different generation of ways to treat diseases,ā€ said Shpigelmacher, who previously cofounded PrimeSense, a 3D sensor technology company acquired by Apple in 2013 for a reported $345 million (some reports suggested as much $360 million or $400 million). PrimeSenseā€™s technology became FaceID.

Eventually, the company aims to deliver a wide range of treatments dispersed throughout the body via ā€œthe Bionaut.ā€ This in mind, Bionautā€™s total addressable market is unknowable, but ā€œany number you came up with would be big enough to justify the investment,ā€ said Samir Kaul, Khosla Ventures founding partner and managing director. OurCrowd CEO and founder Jonathan Medved echoed that sentiment: "What I'm hoping for is that one tenth of the potential is realized.ā€