Why We Backed Lambda Surgical
Physical intelligence for surgery
Dylan Itzikowitz · August 3, 2026
The operating room is one of the most technically advanced environments in medicine and, paradoxically, one where surgeons still navigate complex three-dimensional anatomy through a two-dimensional video feed. The majority of surgeries every year happen under those conditions. Anatomy beneath the surface remains invisible. The surgeon's hands and judgment carry everything.
Billions of dollars are flowing into world models and physical AI to automate the world around us: autonomous vehicles, warehouse robots, industrial systems. These are important problems. But, one of the largest and most consequential opportunities in autonomy sits inside the operating room, where the data layer needed to enable more intelligent, more accessible surgical systems has never been built. That is what Lambda Surgical is doing. The company is developing the physical intelligence layer for surgery: spatial sensing technology that gives surgeons and surgical systems a precise, real-time understanding of the operative field.
I met Roman Stolyarov at an MIT dinner we hosted last fall. Within twenty minutes I knew I was talking to someone rare. He had spent years inside the specific problem, understood the physics of sensing inside the body, knew the regulatory landscape cold, and had the conviction of a founder who had decided this was the most important thing he could build. What he described as obvious and inevitable sounded, to almost anyone else, impossible.
Since then, I've had a front-row seat as he built Lambda from the ground up. He assembled a team of MIT-trained engineers and researchers alongside experts drawn from the medical device, imaging, and robotics worlds, and set a roadmap that most investors and founders in this space quietly avoid: all the way through FDA clearance. He treated it as an engineering problem, not an obstacle.
What Lambda is building is called LambdaGuide: a surgical visualization platform built on LiDAR-based spatial understanding that integrates into existing surgical workflows to deliver real-time, sub-millimeter spatial sensing inside the body including measurement, instrument guidance, and subsurface visualization. At the Society of Robotic Surgery this summer, they demonstrated sub-millimeter precision in human cadaveric anatomy across multiple regions of the body.
As someone who has had multiple surgeries, this one is personal. The promise of spatial intelligence in surgery isn't just about precision. It's about access: more procedures done well, in more places, by more people.
The world models race is underway. Billions are flowing into teaching AI systems to understand physical environments: roads, warehouses, factories. Roman is building the equivalent for the inside of the human body, where the stakes are highest. He is exactly the person you want doing it.
We're proud to have supported Roman at the pre-seed and to double down and co-lead his $6.5M seed round alongside Arielle Zuckerberg at Long Journey Ventures and a great set of partners. Lambda Surgical is hiring. Reach them at roman@lambdasurgical.com.
