Neocis bags $40M to continue transforming dental surgery with robotics

The Miami company is hiring world-class engineers and likely will move into its Wynwood HQ in a few months.

By Nancy Dahlberg

Miami-based Neocis has become the leader in dental implant surgery and its Yomi robotic surgical system has been used to place more than 20,000 implants. 

Let’s put that number in perspective: Just seven months ago, the number of Yomi-directed implants stood at 10,000.

To continue fueling that growth, Neocis announced today the company has completed its latest round of financing, an oversubscribed $40 million round. 

The round was led by a large specialist investor in the dental industry and joined by Intuitive Ventures. Existing investors DFJ Growth, Vivo Capital, Mithril Capital Management, Norwest Venture Partners and medical technology entrepreneur Fred Moll also participated in the round.

“The lead investor is someone we’re technically not disclosing but they are really the premier investor in the dental industry. The other new investor is Intuitive Ventures, which is the venture arm of Intuitive Surgical, the most successful robotic surgery company in history. That intersection is exactly where we are between dentistry and robotic surgery, so we couldn’t have asked for a better investor syndicate,” explained Alon Mozes, Neocis’ co-founder and CEO, in an interview with Refresh Miami. “This new backing underscores Neocis’ strong position in a growing market and will help us further our product development and commercial efforts.”

Alon Mozes, co-founder and CEO of Neocis

In total, Neocis has raised more than $160 million, including a $72 million series D round about a year ago. It’s one of the successful scaleup companies that is making healthcare technology one of South Florida’s most active sectors for venture capital.

Neocis, co-founded by Mozes and Juan Salcedo, developed and sells Yomi, dentistry’s first and only FDA-cleared robotic surgical system. Yomi allows dentists to precisely pre-plan the dental implant procedure and then guides their hand during the surgery according to the pre-operative plan. Because of the increased accuracy and digital planning provided by Yomi, dentists can operate with a smaller incision. For patients, that means less pain and faster recoveries. 

The company will use these funds to expandi Neocis’s successful commercialization efforts. “We get to keep that going, in terms of selling more robots and supporting more cases with our clinical support team, but also driving more innovations in our product development. We should have some really interesting advancements to our software and hardware offerings – pre-operative, intraoperative and post-operative,” Mozes said.

What will that entail? “We’re focused on completing what is called the digital dental workflow. The goal is to have the dentists be able to plan everything in the software, not only the surgical components but also the prosthetic and restorative components,” Mozes said. “Then the robot will help them execute that so they get exactly what they planned. Closing the entire loop end to end is the goal we are aiming for in our product roadmap.”

Mozes grew up in South Florida, and after getting his bachelor’s and master’s in engineering at MIT, he got his start in Silicon Valley working for an innovator in special effects for sports broadcasts. In 2004, he returned to Miami to study biomedical engineering at the University of Miami, earning his Ph.D. In 2005, Mozes became one of the first 20 employees at Mako Surgical, working there through Mako’s IPO in 2008.

Mozes and Salcedo, both engineers who met while working at Mako, had been working on their idea for Neocis on the side, and in 2012 they landed their first angel money from Moll, a robotics pioneer. They are part of a network of former Mako leaders and employees who have gone on to form or grow other ventures in South Florida, including Magic Leap, OrthoSensor, Insightec and DermaSensor.

True to its Miami roots, Neocis is currently hiring for 35 roles in South Florida,  more than half of them engineering jobs in hardware and software R&D.

There will be room for them, too. Earlier this year, Neocis signed a lease for 38,000 square feet of office space at 545wyn in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, triple the size of its former offices. Mozes said today he hopes the team will be moving in within the next few months. “It’s a brand new buildout. It will be gorgeous when we get there.”

Neocis employs about 170 people, up from just 10 in 2016. Mozes said roughly two-thirds of the workforce is based in the Miami area.

“We’re trying to grow as fast as we can. That’s hard to do holding the bar really high, but we’re able to find great world-class talent.”

This report has been updated. Follow Nancy Dahlberg on Twitter @ndahlberg and email her at [email protected]

Nancy Dahlberg