Skylight funding backs projected anatomy guidance for procedures

Illuminant Surgical has raised $8.4M in seed funding to accelerate development and launch of Skylight, its image-based clinical guidance platform.

The Los Angeles-based company said the round was led by Wing 2 Wing Ventures, with participation from the National Science Foundation, National Cancer Institute, National Institute on Aging, Elderberry Ventures, Soma Capital, DRF, and other venture partners.

Skylight is designed to project a patient’s internal anatomy from medical images directly onto the body surface during procedures. The goal is to reduce the need for physicians to move attention between external monitors and the operative field.

The platform combines 2 proprietary technologies. SkinMatch uses adhesive markers and computer vision to align medical images, such as radiographs, with the patient’s anatomy in real time. LightScreen is a depth-adaptive projection system that displays anatomy on the patient’s skin while adjusting for body contours and movement.

Illuminant is initially targeting spine surgery and cancer biopsy procedures, with plans to adapt the system across a broader range of image-guided interventions. The company is positioning Skylight as a way to make image guidance more intuitive and less dependent on separate navigation displays.

The funding follows growing interest in technologies that bring imaging data closer to the procedural field. Conventional image-guided workflows often require physicians to mentally translate 2D or 3D imaging information from a screen into patient anatomy. Projection-based guidance attempts to reduce that translation step by placing relevant anatomy where the clinician is working.

Fortune reported that Illuminant was founded in 2021 and raised the seed round to build what the company describes as “X-ray vision” for doctors. The report also noted that about half of the $8.4M round came from federal grant funding.

The company also opened Nexus, a Los Angeles research facility of more than 12,000 square feet, according to a LinkedIn post by cofounder and co-CEO James Hu, MD. The facility brings the company’s core teams under one roof as it advances engineering, manufacturing, and clinical work.

The platform is notable because it depends on medical images becoming usable at the bedside or in the operating room in a more direct way. The value will depend on registration accuracy, workflow speed, usability, procedural safety, and whether projection guidance improves outcomes or reduces procedure time.

Illuminant has not announced regulatory clearance in the materials reviewed. The seed funding is therefore a development and commercialization milestone, not evidence of routine clinical availability.

The next steps will likely involve clinical validation, regulatory strategy, manufacturing scale-up, and site-based testing in the first intended procedural areas.