Exclusive: Startup pioneering tiny robots that can travel inside the brain gets $28 million in new venture funding featuring Robeauté
The 1966 science fiction film Fantastic Voyage imagined a technology that could shrink people to microscopic size so they could use a tiny submarine to travel through a person’s body and repair a blood clot in an injured scientist’s brain. Today a Paris-based startup called Robeauté announced it has secured $28 million in venture capital funding to essentially make this sci-fi concept a reality. Well, not the shrinking people part. The company has created a self-propelled microrobot, just 1.8 millimeters long—approximately the size of a grain of rice—that can travel inside the human brain to assist neurosurgeons. The company is targeting tissue sample collection for biopsies as its first use case, but Robeauté hopes it has designed its robot to be a cargo-agnostic carrier that could eventually be used to deliver cancer drugs directly to otherwise inoperable and hard-to-treat brain tumors or implant electrodes deep inside the brain to provide treatments for Parkinson’s or other brain disorders.
