CONNEC TEVE(코넥티브), a medical software and surgical robotics company, has raised $3 million (KRW 4 billion) in pre-A round funding.

The round was led by DSC Investment with participation from Stonebridge Ventures, Schmidt and Reventures (a private equity firm), bringing the company’s total cumulative investment to $3.6 million (KRW 4.8 billion). CONNEC TEVE plans to use the investment to expand its workforce to develop next-generation surgical robots and pursue medical device approvals for its AI-based musculoskeletal reading software.

CONNEC TEVE has developed high quality AI technology from more than 100,000 data points labelled by university hospital specialists. Based on this technology, CONNEC TEVE was selected for Deep Tech Tips by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups last year and received $1.13 million (KRW 1.5 billion) in technology development funding over three years. In addition, the company was selected to participate in the Patient-Doctor Shared Decision-Making Model Development and Empirical Research Project, hosted by Seoul National University Hospital and conducted in collaboration with the Industry Academic Cooperation Foundation Chosun University, Seoul Boramae Medical Center and Chung Ang University Industry Academic Cooperation Foundation (CAU IACF).

DuHyun Ro, CEO of CONNEC TEVE, said, “There are more than 500 million people with osteoarthritis worldwide, and 200 million musculoskeletal X-rays are taken annually in Korea alone, so the social costs and losses caused by joint diseases are rapidly increasing.” “With AI-based reading assistant software and next-generation surgical robots, we will provide a breakthrough solution to improve the accuracy of joint replacement surgery to 95% while increasing efficiency, benefiting both hospitals and patients,” he said.