Karl Storz partners with Moon Surgical, Sovato to build open robotic surgery ecosystem

KARL STORZ, a global endoscopy and imaging company, has entered strategic partnerships with Moon Surgical and Sovato aimed at building a more open and interoperable robotics ecosystem for the operating room, the company announced.

The collaborations combine KARL STORZ's advanced 3D visualization, digital technologies and OR integration systems with Moon Surgical's AI-native robotic-assisted surgery platform and Sovato's remote robotic surgery and procedure technology. The partnerships will launch first in the United States, with a global rollout planned to follow.

KARL STORZ said its technologies are already deployed in more than 15,000 integrated operating rooms worldwide, giving the company a base of experience in connected surgical environments that it's now extending through outside partnerships rather than developing every layer in-house.

"We believe the future of robotic surgery will be shaped by collaboration, connectivity, and the ability to bring together complementary technology layers in ways that create meaningful value for customers," Christy Gaudet, global head of solutions at KARL STORZ, said in a statement. "By combining our strengths in advanced 3D visualization, operating room integration, and workflow solutions with the expertise of our partners, we are pursuing ways to advance a more connected and interoperable surgical environment while opening new possibilities for surgeons and healthcare providers."

Moon Surgical partnership targets workflow and access

Moon Surgical, a French-American company, develops the Maestro platform, which uses real-time, AI-native intraoperative capabilities and workflow automation to increase predictability and reduce variability during procedures. Under the partnership, KARL STORZ and Moon Surgical are pairing Maestro's capabilities with KARL STORZ's 3D visualization and workflow integration technology.

The companies said the goal is to make minimally invasive surgery more efficient and more accessible across a broad range of surgical settings, including hospitals, rural health facilities and ambulatory surgery centers — a scalability push that echoes efforts elsewhere in the sector, such as Johnson & Johnson's early clinical results for its OTTAVA robotic surgical system in general surgery procedures.

Sovato partnership focuses on connected surgical care

Sovato, a California-based remote robotic surgery and procedure platform, is working with KARL STORZ to support future models of connected surgical care. Through the partnership, KARL STORZ's 3D visualization technologies are intended to support remote surgical collaboration and future connectivity-driven applications. The companies said they aim to link robotics and digital layers to lay the groundwork for remote collaboration, training and surgical support — a direction similar to what EndoQuest described in its expanded collaboration with NVIDIA to advance cloud-enabled monitoring and teleproctoring in endoluminal robotic surgery.

An industry moving toward open platforms

The KARL STORZ announcement reflects a broader shift underway across surgical robotics, as device makers increasingly favor open, modular partnerships over closed, single-vendor systems. Rather than building every component internally, companies with strength in one layer of the technology stack — visualization, instrumentation, connectivity or OR integration — are increasingly pairing with specialists in adjacent layers to bring combined systems to market faster.

That trend is partly a response to the practical realities facing hospitals and surgery centers: staffing constraints, turnover-time pressures and the cost of retraining staff on entirely new platforms all favor solutions that can integrate with existing OR infrastructure rather than replace it wholesale. Interoperability has also become a selling point for smaller and rural facilities, which often can't absorb the capital cost of a fully proprietary robotic ecosystem but may be able to adopt individual components that plug into systems they already have.

Remote and connected care capabilities, in particular, are drawing increased attention as a way to extend surgical expertise beyond major academic centers, supporting teleproctoring, remote case support and training for surgeons in lower-volume settings. As more companies pursue partnership-based models rather than fully vertically integrated platforms, interoperability standards and data-sharing agreements between vendors are likely to become a growing area of focus across the sector.