Hall C held many pairs of eyes, all fixed on the same point.
Most of them had chosen to be in this room because of its promise, and it was up to him to deliver.
The responsibility felt heavy in his chest.
But he was more excited than afraid, because he knew how important this moment was for him, for the people in that room, for the company he represented, and for humanity as a whole.
Yes, humanity.
Millions upon millions of people in the world were going blind from something he was about to prove could be fixed.
In a way, he was answering his colleague’s thought from four years ago.
There must be a better way…
He would show the world, even if that world started with just the people in this one room in Boston, Massachusetts.
When his name was announced, he took a deep breath and stepped forward.
And went on to change the course of human eye treatment.
Missed Part I? Read the full article on our website.
Welcome to the second (and final) part of our ForSight Robotics cover.
And with that, we conclude the fourth Zero to Unicorn story - a deep dive into the successes, hardships, and lessons learned by founders who’ve made it to the coveted unicorn status.
We’re just getting started, so we’re going to offer a rare opportunity here. This week, you get to nominate an upcoming Zero to Unicorn cover.
It’s simple. Reply to this email with a startup that recently hit a valuation of a billion or more, and we’ll get in touch with their team to give you their story from Zero to Unicorn.
Dr. Joseph Nathan was looking at the speaker with everybody else, with hope in his eye. Him mind, however, was somewhere else. He was thinking about how much every decision had led to this room, this moment, this day.
His co-founders Professor Emeritus Moshe Shoham, Daniel Glozman, and he had a shared conviction that people should have easier access to eye care surgery, and they’d turned it into a company, ForSight Robotics.
For four years, they worked tirelessly to build a robot capable of performing the world's most common eye surgery.
What started as a small prototype designed to perform partial procedures and prove that micron-scale manipulation inside the human eye was possible had become a robust and integrated visualization platform, capable of performing complete cataract surgeries from start to finish.
This culminated in their first trials using animal eyes, a critical step before the technology could go anywhere near a human patient.
That sounds pretty sci-fi to us.
First ForSight logo and initial platform design. (Courtesy of ForSight)
Now, it was time to show it to the world.
In April 2024, at the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons annual meeting, the world saw what ForSight’s ORYOM platform was capable of.
There, Dr. David F. Chang, one of the most prominent cataract surgeons in the world, ranked #5 in the 2023 Power List of the 100 Most Influential Ophthalmologists, and also a member of ForSight’s Clinical Advisory Board, presented a video of him performing a complete cataract procedure using robotic arms, operating from a workstation 20 feet away from the patient.
“This is the first time I’m showing a video of me operating on an animal eye... The robotic arms were precisely mirroring what my hands were doing.”
It landed as exactly the kind of proof the company needed.
One of the world's most influential ophthalmologists demonstrating robotic cataract surgery from one of the field's most prestigious stages.
Dr. David F. Chang operates the ORYOM platform from a console, while robotic arms perform the procedure inside the eye. (ForSight YouTube channel)
From there, around February 2025, ForSight made the significant accomplishment of achieving… ISO 13485:2016 certification.
Huh?
Not exactly the kind of news that breaks the internet. But in the medical world, this is make or break.
We’ll explain.
ISO certification is the ubiquitous gate. It's the international benchmark that proves your product is consistently designed, developed, and manufactured to be safe. Without it, there's no credible path toward FDA approval, and consequently, no path to the U.S. market at all.
In the U.S. alone, cataract surgery is the most common medical procedure, with almost 4 million surgeries performed yearly.
ForSight could not afford to miss this opportunity. And it didn’t.
If the ASCRS presentation was the proof that the technology worked, ISO certification was the proof that the company could be trusted to build it responsibly, at scale, under regulatory scrutiny.
In June 2025, ForSight closed a $125 million Series B round, led by Eclipse, with Dr. Fred Moll himself participating as an investor alongside the Adani Group, Reiya Ventures, and other existing investors. This round brought ForSight Robotics’ total funding to $195 million, used to accelerate the next growth phase and prepare the company for its first-in-human clinical trials. By then, the team had surpassed 110 employees.
ForSight co-founders with an early version of the eye-surgery robot. (Courtesy of ForSight)
Joseph told us of how everything so far took him back to a show he watched as a kid, Small Wonder. It was an American TV show about a 10-year-old android named Vicki, designed to help children with special needs, and had superhuman strength and speed and ran on atomic power.
“It’s amazing to see the progress today’s humanoid robots have made toward what Hollywood imagined they could do all those years ago.”
The boy who once watched a fictional robot change lives on TV had grown up to build a real one that could do the same for millions of people across the globe.
They would soon break an even bigger, more impressive record.
Before ForSight would make history again, it first hit an impressive milestone.
In October 2025, ForSight announced the completion of over 300 robotic cataract procedures on animal eye models, performed across more than 25 different surgeons.
Emphasis on 25 different surgeons.
It’s one thing for the founders, or for a hand-picked expert like David, to operate the system successfully. It's another for over two dozen surgeons with their own habits, their own hands, and their own training to pick up the same platform and get it to work.
That's one of a long list of real tests a robotic surgery system has to pass; whether it works consistently across different hands, hundreds of times over.
And that's true of any product hoping to reach scale. It has to work well for many different types of people.
What a great appetizer to the record ForSight broke next.
It happened in February 2026.
ForSight made history.
Because that’s the first time the technology would touch a human eye.
The world's first fully robot-assisted cataract surgery in a human patient was completed using the ForSight platform, now known as JASPER, the latest and most advanced iteration of ForSight’s platform.
The surgery was performed by Dr. Alexey Rapoport at the Asian Eye Institute in Manila, Philippines, with Dr. Robert Ang, Chief of Cornea and Refractive Surgery at the Asian Eye Institute of the Philippines, serving as Principal Investigator.
Two thumbs up from the world's first patient to undergo fully robot-assisted cataract surgery in Manila, Philippines. (ForSight Newsroom)
On top of that, the procedure was completed from start to finish without general anesthesia, aligning with the current standard of modern cataract surgery.
As Robert highlights:
“You want to make sure that all cases do well because we are humans, imperfect. Sometimes you deviate, or things don't exactly happen the way you want them to happen. And it's consistency that you need... Now, with the aid of robotics, we go up a level of precision and accuracy.”
Inside the operating room in Manila where the JASPER platform was in action during the world's first robot-assisted cataract surgery. (ForSight YouTube channel)
Of course, this is one step in what remains a long and demanding climb with more than 600 million people waiting at the top.
The path ahead requires persistence, resilience, and a tolerance for uncertainty that would make most people flinch.
Fortunately, this trio has never been most people.
Take Daniel Glozman, for instance. An avid extreme sports enthusiast, he has built a career out of doing things that require a very high tolerance for the unknown, first in robotics research, then as a serial founder, and now as CTO of an ambitious medical device company.
That mountain, for Daniel, is just another version of the tortuous waters he's been training to navigate for years.
Daniel enjoying one of his favorite pastimes, windsurfing. (Courtesy of ForSight)
But the truth is, all three of them carry that same quality in different ways.
Moshe Shoham spent decades building things that didn't exist yet, in a field that didn’t exist when he started (robotic surgery).
Joseph Nathan walked away from a career of building other people's companies to build his own.
None of them got here by playing it safe.
Which is exactly the kind of team you want facing what comes next. Despite all of ForSight’s successes thus far, there is still one huge hurdle the company is racing to overcome: FDA approval.
We'd love to share with you, not so many years from now, how this product is carving out space in the market in the U.S. and across the globe.
Achieving that is a process.
"Health in the U.S., it's the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA. And usually you're in dialogue with them to see, depending on the product, they want to see past experience with similar products that people had, or they want to see what we call clinical trials. You actually do the procedure on a selected group of people who are volunteering for that trial, and you're showing them the results. If the results are good, they usually approve. They also need to see the benefit in that technology. And that's the way it works, a bit different in every country, but that's usually how it works."
When asked which country is furthest along, and whether he could share anything about sales numbers, Joseph adds:
"The U.S., that's our first target market. But we see ourselves as a global company, so Europe, India, China, and Japan will follow … there is potential here to be kind of the next Intuitive. Intuitive Surgical is now maybe a $160, $170 billion market cap company, with around $10 billion in annual sales. They're dominating a specific field, general surgery. So, we're seeing the eye surgery market, or ophthalmology, as a comparable market. We are positioned to be the first in that market. And if we do a great job, that's the outcome we'd eventually like to have."
In June 2026, JASPER was named a finalist in the Groundbreaking Technology category of the Surgical Robotics Technology Industry Awards, one year after ForSight won the Innovative Start-up Award in that same competition.
Awards are, of course, really amazing, but they were never the point. Giving people the gift of sight was and will always be the main reason behind everything the trio has been doing.
“Seeing the patients today, meeting them, going through the robotic surgery ... seeing the joy on their faces after the procedure, seeing their ability to get this wonderful gift of sight, that is really why ForSight Robotics was built, and I'm so happy that we're able to achieve this today.”
And it turns out, cataract surgery is only the first step.
The first robot-assisted cataract surgery patient smiles and greets Dr. Joseph Nathan as Dr. Robert Ang looks on. (ForSight Newsroom)
That’s because JASPER was designed from the ground up as an elastic system, built to reach every point within the eye. That means glaucoma, retina, and cornea surgery are already part of the plan.
Each of those fields shares the same problem cataracts did: a shortage of surgeons, procedures that demand extreme precision and dexterity, and patients going without treatment or even blind due to something that is left uncured simply because there aren't enough hands to perform it.
It’s only a matter of time.
What started in an operating room, with a resident soaked in sweat and fingers curled into a claw, is now a robot built to get you or someone you love the eye-saving care you deserve.
Turns out, there is a better way.
The eye, it turns out, was never the smallest part of this story. It was actually the biggest.
1. See the gap everyone else normalized
Sometimes the biggest opportunities are hiding in plain sight, disguised as "just the way things are." Millions of renters paying rent that builds nothing. Millions of patients going blind from something treatable. As Ankur Jain did with Bilt, and as Joseph, Moshe, and Daniel did with ForSight, they refused to treat a massive, normalized problem as unsolvable.
2. The unglamorous work is the real foundation
ISO certification, clinical trial paperwork, authorizations… The boring chapters are usually the ones that hold everything together. Yes, it's arguably harder in ForSight's case. A health product comes with layers of bureaucracy most startups never have to touch. But this same unglamorous work with paperwork and processes holds for founders building in any industry. Behind every headline about a funding round or a growing headcount, there's a much longer and boring list of tasks that made that headline possible in the first place. Be prepared for it as well.
3. A nonlinear career is the differentiator
Joseph’s path as an engineer, business builder, and surgeon looks scattered on paper. In practice, it's the only combination of experiences that could have produced ForSight's specific insight.
Life isn't linear, and you're never starting from scratch. Every experience, even the ones tied to ideas that failed, carries valuable insights and differentiates you, as long as you stay open and attentive enough to learn from them.
4. Solve your own problem first
Joseph was solving a problem that once left him soaked in sweat and with hands curled into a claw. There's a different kind of conviction that comes from having lived the pain you're building a cure for.
It's the same conviction that drove Eric Simons to build bolt.new after his wedding website that never got built. When the founder is also the first person who needed the solution to exist, the problem becomes personal, and personal problems tend to get solved with an unmatched urgency.
5. Academics and industry don’t have to exist in silos
ForSight’s founders came from university labs, and they are experts in their fields, having spent years researching and working in robotics. But they also created companies, incubated startups, led R&D at major medical device firms… They combined all their strengths to apply their expertise and go after a market that could impact the lives of millions of people.
It’s actually a lesson we have espoused here at Unicorner long before it was demonstrated by the AI labs: academics and industry shouldn't be separate worlds. In fact, this combination has proven to be one of the most powerful and valuable.
