by Ishpreet Khanuja
This post has been updated: February 25, 2025.
A global pandemic disrupted core processes and operations, and technology became the catalyst to keep operations running at a time when people were mandated to remain at home. In the case of Vivo Surgery, the community needed access to a hands-on, surgical learning environment without entering an operating room at all.
In 2020, as all learners and educators adapted to online classrooms and virtual lessons, a med student in Dr. Aleksa Cenic’s class at McMaster University faced a unique challenge: being shut out of live surgeries. “She told me that she was losing out on her education,” recounts Vivo Surgery founder Dr. Cenic. “She was interested in studying surgery, but couldn’t get into an operating room to experience, firsthand, what it’s like to be in that environment.”
Thus began the journey to build what is now Vivo Surgery—a ground-breaking, all-in-one platform empowering higher education programs across the country by providing digital placements to students in surgical rooms.
Solving Real-World Problems Virtually
Vivo Surgery offers a secure, high-definition, multi-view livestream from the operating room to provide an interactive learning and real-time collaboration experience for surgeons across the world. Not only do students get clearer insight into the surgery via headcams (something achieved with difficulty in a crowded operating room), but the technology also integrates with surgical visualization devices allowing for a complete shadowing experience.
Vivo Surgery has now grown from its roots in education and gone on to facilitate successful learning experiences with surgeons in war-torn regions. The platform has created room for inclusive perspectives in surgery—a concept frequently theorized in medicine and ripe with potential for practice.
“It seemed like it was a big value proposition that we could help solve the diversity problem in surgery,” notes co-founder and CEO Phillip Mohabir. “So that’s what we initially started pursuing—working to create more diversity in neurosurgery and orthopedics, which are the two specialties that have the biggest diversity gaps.”
With over 15 years of experience in digital transformation, Mohabir has been instrumental in making Vivo Surgery the powerhouse of innovation that it is today. After overseeing global expansion across 85 countries for the Canadian theatrical distribution platform IMAX, he found Vivo Surgery to be a perfect opportunity to challenge the confines of an age-old industry and invite new ways of envisioning what is possible.
“The big problem that we solve is making sure patients are getting access to the best care by removing the bottleneck of training surgeons on new procedures and tools—we’re excited to bring this to more medical students and surgeons around the world.”
Exciting Time to be a Game-Changer
Vivo Surgery was the inaugural recipient of $50,000 from the Drive Spark Funding Grant through the Hamilton Health Sciences Hospital, a program dedicated to supporting innovative solutions that seek to improve patient outcomes within healthcare. They have strengthened their ongoing relationship with Hamilton Health Sciences Hospital this year and have applied for an additional $50,000 in non-dilutive funding again through Drive Spark. This partnership provides the platform with wider access to a network of highly skilled and experienced surgeons in Canadian healthcare.
This approach to expansion is mirrored on the academic front; Vivo Surgery is onboarding several new medical programs in the new year, with a noteworthy admission into U.S. Physician Assistant programs. This is in addition to their longstanding partnership with McMaster University’s Integrated Biomedical Engineering & Health Sciences program where the platform has been incorporated as a mandatory feature.
Another area of great success for the technology has been a pilot program conducted at the Juravinski Cancer Center and West Lincoln Memorial in Hamilton where perioperative nurses are trained via real-time remote shadowing. The initiative demonstrates promising results, showcasing the impact of synchronized surgical teams in optimizing efficiency and leveraging individual strengths in an operating environment.
When the possibilities are endless, the product continues to evolve. Empowering its AI initiatives to enhance knowledge retention, create dynamic and searchable content libraries and enable surgical research, the team is working to develop synthetic simulations to test new techniques and refine procedures in a risk-free environment.
Gearing up for Greatness with Altitude Accelerator
“Altitude Accelerator has been instrumental in transforming our initial opportunistic sales activities into a structured, scalable process by guiding us to implement account-based sales methodologies early on,” says Mohabir. “We gained a head start in building a robust sales engine while simultaneously refining our product.”
Vivo Surgery was able to save valuable time by simultaneously developing sales and product strategies instead of waiting for one to lead to the other—time that has been spent laying the groundwork for the company’s upcoming first round of funding. The path is clear and the vision offers solution to help develop a resilient, equitable and efficient healthcare system capable of meeting the growing demands of an aging population.
As of February 25th, 2025 Vivo Surgery has announced some critical milestones: 1) The company has been selected a client of Intellectual Property Ontario (IPON), which strengthens their existing patent strategy funding. 2) The company recently also announced their pre-seed raise, with 30% already committed. Congratulations to Philip Mohabir and the team at Vivo Surgery!
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