Have you ever seen the movie Fantastic Voyage? I hadnāt, 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 whyāthe 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 companyās goal is to build āan elegant solutionā¦that can reach places in the body we previously just couldnāt go,ā said Bionaut CEO and cofounder Michael Shpigelmacher.
So far, the companyās animal testing has been successful, and Bionaut has now raised more cash in anticipation of what will be the companyās biggest challenge yet: human clinical trials later this year.
Fortune can exclusively report that Bionautās 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 didnāt 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.
Bionautās micro-robot is about the size of a grain of rice and is meant to move through the human bodyās bloodstream and tissue to deliver drugs far more accurately than we can today. The micro-robot is controlled through magnetismāBionautās 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). PrimeSenseās technology became FaceID.
Eventually, the company aims to deliver a wide range of treatments dispersed throughout the body via āthe Bionaut.ā This in mind, Bionautās total addressable market is unknowable, but āany 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