Only the clinking of steel instruments could be heard as the scrub nurse organized them one by one. 

All else was quiet. The room was tiny, with people crowded into it. 

The circulating nurse ran a final check on the monitoring equipment. The anesthesiologist confirmed the sedation levels. 

Surgical mask on. Gloves on.

Piece of cake, he thought. Cataract surgery is one of the most precise surgeries out there. Plus, this equipment looks straight out of the Starship Enterprise.

The next 18 minutes said otherwise.

He didn't even have enough room to move his hands. His goggles kept fogging up. His fingers, too rigid, almost curled into a claw.

He finished the surgery soaked in sweat.

Only one thought remained in his mind after this experience: This couldn’t be the best care they had to offer to patients, right? There had to be a better way…

And indeed there was. 

What he didn't yet know was that he, Joseph Nathan, would be the one to build it.

This is the story of ForSight and its three founders, Dr. Joseph Nathan, Professor Emeritus Moshe Shoham, and Daniel Glozman, along with what happens when three people decide that 600 million is too large a number to ignore.  

As it turns out, three is our lucky number. 

After our deep dives into beehiiv, Bilt, and Bolt, it’s time to run our next Zero to Unicorn series on a company that doesn’t have a “B” starting its name.

Kidding… sort of.

Let’s begin our dive into ForSight’s Zero to Unicorn story: the company building robots saving sight.

Ethan and Arek 🦄

Big presentation. 40 people in the room, some cameras off, most mics muted. 

You spent a month fighting for this 5-minute window to convince the CFO that your next campaign is worth the budget. 

Arguments sharp, data pushed, even an icebreaker joke ready to go.

Then you start with static slides. You read, click, read, next.

Nobody's amused. Why would they be? That’s boring. 

Now imagine live audience software running alongside your presentation. 

Live polls, reactions, and raffles are happening while you're still talking. The room laughs, asks questions, and you feel the energy shift.

No boring faces staring at you, no yawning.

You get your yes.

The best part? Building it is the easiest part. 

Describe the deck at Bolt Slides and get a working interactive presentation in minutes. No templates, no plugins.

See it live at bolt.new.

This is sponsored content.

ForSight was founded in 2020. But if we were being honest, it started way back in the 1950s with a young boy who just liked to build and fix things, trying to understand how they worked, how they were built, and how they could be better. 

This childhood interest blossomed into an obsession with robotic systems, and this boy would grow up to become Professor Emeritus Moshe Shoham, one of the world’s leaders in medical robots and head of the robotics lab at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.  

It didn't happen overnight, of course. Moshe spent years moving between some of the world's leading academic institutions, including Columbia in New York and Stanford in California, building his expertise and expanding his thinking. It was during his time at Stanford in 1994 that he began to seriously consider developing medical robots, which were still in their infancy. 

This stuck with him all the way until he returned home and, in his own words:

By the turn of the 21st century, he was already a professor of mechanical engineering, shaping the next generation of robotics researchers.

Moshe went on to found Mazor Robotics in 2001, the first surgical robotics platform for spine applications, a company born out of his research and interest in a field taking its very first steps at the time. There were no approved medical robots in the world. Soon, Mazor became the world's leading robotics platform for spine surgery through the 2010s. Spine surgery is delicate by nature, and the goal was to improve accuracy during this procedure. 

So, a robotics company that's focused on precision surgery... keep that in mind. 

At the end of 2018, Medtronic, a global healthcare technology company, acquired Mazor for $1.6 billion.

Along the way, Moshe built a portfolio of over 50 patents, more than a dozen awards (including the prestigious Thomas A. Edison Patent Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2013), and election to the National Academy of Engineering in 2014 for contributions to robotic technology for image-guided surgery.

So, with all due respect, we can say that if you want someone by your side while building a robotics-driven eye company, he's your guy.

And remember, he's just one of the brains behind this undertaking.

The second brain entering the scene belongs to Daniel Glozman. Around the year 2000, when Moshe was launching Mazor, Daniel was starting his PhD in mechanical engineering at the Technion. It’s no surprise, then, that he ended up being one of Moshe's students.  

He was specializing in flexible needle steering for percutaneous therapies. 

To us mortals: doctors often insert needles into the body for things like biopsies or drug delivery. The problem is that thin, more comfortable needles bend as they push through tissue, making them hard to control and easy to miss the target with. On the other hand, thicker, straighter needles cause more pain and can't curve around obstacles inside the body. 

Daniel aimed to create a system that could guide thin, flexible needles with more precision, reducing pain and risk for the patient. 

After he completed his PhD in 2006, he went on to postdoctoral research at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where, together with other researchers, he helped develop Raven-II, an open platform for surgical robotics research that was being researched by seven universities.

Its main idea was to allow researchers to explore techniques in telerobotic surgery by modifying the hardware and software according to their needs.

Around 2007, Daniel founded Guide-X, a company built on technology developed at the university. The goal was to help clinicians position needles in soft tissue for lung biopsies, catching lung cancer at its earliest, most treatable stage. That technology would later become the foundation of XACT Robotics’ surgical system, a company advancing the field of radiology with the world's first image-guided robotic system for needle-based procedures.

By 2013, Daniel had joined XACT Robotics' Scientific Advisory Board, a role he would hold for nearly eleven years, until 2024. 

Delicate surgery. Robotic systems. Precision engineering. Technology reshaping critical steps in patient care… You can see the picture taking shape here, right?

Not yet a founding team, but getting closer. 

What they needed was just one final piece.

And Joseph Nathan, our cataract surgery resident, and his heartbroken desolation, would be the one to place it.

While Moshe was building the academic foundation of surgical robotics and Daniel was turning his PhD research into companies, Joseph was building the infrastructure that makes companies possible in the first place.

That’s because his career was a little unconventional compared to the traditional paths we’ve seen so far, since he holds a B.Sc. in biotechnology, an M.Sc. in industrial engineering, entrepreneurship, and strategic management, then finally finishing with an MD. 

In other words, he was interested in engineering combined with entrepreneurship and medicine.  

Starting in 2005, he worked in technology transfer at the Technion, commercializing the university's biomedical inventions.

And here's where the story starts getting interestingly tangled.

By 2009, he'd moved into a more hands-on role, helping structure the business side of new medical ventures and securing capital for them, all while sitting as a board observer for companies like Microbot Medical and… XACT Robotics. 

Sound familiar? That’s exactly the company based on technology Daniel helped to create. 

Then, from 2015 to 2018, he headed the Grassroots program at the Alfred Mann Institute at the Technion. It was a $100 million joint venture incubating medical startups. His job, in his own words, was to actively work with physicians from medical institutes worldwide, hunting for ideas great enough to transform healthcare.

To put it simply, by the time Joseph started thinking about founding something of his own that would impact people’s lives and health worldwide, he'd spent over a decade inside the machinery that builds medtech companies. 

But something was missing. He'd spent years on one side of the table. 

Now, he needed to understand what was on the other side. 

And to do that, he had to do something that would look, to anyone watching from the outside, a little crazy.  

Joseph (briefly) left that world of building companies to become an ophthalmic surgery resident at Rambam Health Care Campus in 2019.

He had no idea yet what that decision was about to set in motion. Looking back now, though, it's crystal clear what it meant.

Why ophthalmic surgery specifically? In his opinion, the eye is the most elegant piece in our body, and he was drawn to eye surgery because of its technological complexity and precision demands. 

So, from 2019 to 2021, he trained to become a surgeon, and he witnessed how eye surgeries could be so simple and extraordinarily demanding at the same time. His first surgery during residency was a reality check that encouraged him to think outside the box.

Together with his engineering and business innovation background, this shocking experience gave Joseph enough insight to want to build a healthcare solution for the ophthalmic field that could benefit patients at scale. 

While Joseph was putting the pieces together, he couldn't let go of a simple question: if robotic technology had already been transforming surgeries for decades, why did nothing like it exist for the eye? 

He brought that question to Moshe, “the godfather of surgical robotics,” and he didn't have a good answer for why it hadn't been done. So instead, they decided to do it themselves. But they would need an extra pair of hands. 

And that would be Daniel Glozman, as an early and bright student of Moshe's, and in 2020, ForSight Robotics was born. 

The problem the trio chose to attack first? Cataracts. Why?

Well, 600 million people worldwide currently suffer from cataracts, making it the leading cause of blindness globally. Yet only around 30 million cataract surgeries are performed each year worldwide, meaning it might take someone experiencing cataracts 10 years to get treatment. It’s the most common surgery, yet still criminally administered. 

Moreover, an estimated 2.2 billion people worldwide have a vision impairment. The shocking and saddest part is that it could be prevented for 1 billion of them. This burden is estimated to cost $3 trillion annually in lost productivity, healthcare, and social care.

This isn’t rocket science. These numbers don't add up, and saying it’s a big problem is an understatement. 

So, what happens when you can’t scale humans to meet the people’s needs?

And there's one more thing. 

Cataract surgery is highly repetitive, occurs step by step with little to no surprises, and requires precision and dexterity within one of the smallest spaces a surgeon will ever work in. Besides, it's bloodless. 

In other words, it's the perfect kind of environment to develop and test a robotics platform.

Building a tool that would be easier to train through machine learning and that could make this kind of surgery more accessible was the goal. And, as a consequence, capturing this huge market could position whatever solution they built as the world's leading healthcare company.

It was, without question, an ambitious plan. 

But for Joseph, it never felt like it could be anything less. He had spent his entire career building the infrastructure for other people's ideas. Now, the idea was his own. And, he was prepared. 

He shared how, during his years in university, he was already leading high-level transactions among high-quality people, which shaped both his confidence and his network. 

That same audacity, paired with the network and persistence he'd built over the years, is what the team carried into 2020 to build ForSight.

Together, the three of them set out to build a platform that could finally answer the question a young resident had once asked in an operating room.

And they would need all the help they could get.

The revolutionary idea didn't stay on paper and in their heads for long. 

Still in 2020, Dr. Fred Moll, founder of Intuitive Surgical in the 1990s and Auris Health (acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2019), joined the company’s strategic advisory board. 

Same for Rony Abovitz, founder of Mako Surgical, a leader in surgical robotics, which was acquired in 2013 by Stryker Corp for $1.65 billion, and Magic Leap, a leader in XR/spatial computing technologies. 

In plain English: two of the most consequential names in surgical robotics were betting early on these three founders. 

Remember Theranos, the blood testing startup that claimed to run hundreds of diagnostic tests from a single drop of blood and turned out to be one of the biggest frauds in Silicon Valley history? (If not, set aside a weekend to watch the Hulu miniseries “The Dropout”).  

Investors and insiders in this space have seen that pattern repeat enough times to be cautious by default.

So this kinds of support means a lot.

In addition, ForSight started to be guided by a clinical advisory board comprising world-renowned ophthalmic surgeons, such as Drs. David Chang, Vance Thompson, Sam Garg, and Modi Naftali, who have remained on board since the very beginning, all the way through to today, in 2026.

ForSight had assembled a circle of validators that told the world one thing clearly: this was worth watching.

And this early trust would be tested and rewarded quickly. 

In March 2021, ForSight raised $10 million in a so-called “mega-seed round” from Eclipse Ventures and Mithril Capital.

But… what about the product? 

Enter JASPER (formerly ORYOM).

Its goal is to shorten the learning curve in ophthalmic surgery and create a surgeon-centered, ergonomic design. With that, surgeons can keep performing procedures for longer periods of time without fatigue, burnout, or the claw hands that come with traditional surgery. 

Joseph explains that it takes around 15 years, on average, to train a surgeon to reach top productivity in eye surgery. On top of that, nearly two out of three experience musculoskeletal issues, with 15% retiring early due to physical pain and discomfort. 

In other words, it takes a long time to form a specialist in this kind of delicate surgery, time that millions of people don't have. And their working lifespan is short, worn down by the physical toll of performing this kind of surgery over and over again.

Like with any new medical device (or product, for that matter) making its way to market, the road ahead was still long, winding, and full of gatekeepers. 

But by 2022, the team had something impressive to show for their work: the platform had already been used successfully in multiple cataract procedures on animal eye models. 

It was a small, yet also massive, accomplishment.

Yet, to reach its goal of 600 million humans, the team was just getting started.

Most big transformations don't happen in front of a huge audience, and that doesn't make them any less life-changing. 

Coming up in Part II, you'll see how the Starship Enterprise-level equipment Joseph was waiting for during his very first cataract surgery finally sees the light of day.

And, surprisingly, that moment was only the beginning of a bigger history being made in eye care, one that could benefit millions of people worldwide.

Stay tuned.