Founder of a vitalist fund that treats aging and death as a solvable engineering problem called a self-learning surgical robot one of the movement's investments

Founder of a vitalist fund that treats aging and death as a solvable engineering problem called a self-learning surgical robot one of the movement's investments

Startup Aleph Surgical raised $7.5M in a seed round led by venture firm a16z. The company is building an autonomous surgical robot that plans and carries out operations on its own. Adam Gries, founder of the Vitalism Foundation, publicly tied the deal to the movement's mission.

On September 30, Aleph Surgical announced the round and explained how its robot differs from previous surgical machines. Robots like da Vinci are the surgeon's instrument: the machine mirrors the movements of the surgeon's hands but makes no decisions on its own. Aleph trains its robot differently: the model plans the operation and carries it out without a human operator. The company calls this an "embodied foundation model," trained on a dataset spanning multiple surgical procedures and deployed on its Mark 0 robot. In a demonstration, the robot performed a vascular anastomosis (the joining of blood vessels, one of the most precise manual procedures in surgery) on living, constantly shifting anatomy.

Before Aleph, autonomous surgery came down to two paths: a fixed sequence of movements for a single procedure in the lab, or remote human control, as with da Vinci. The breakthrough came in the summer of 2025, when a Johns Hopkins University team showed that their robot could autonomously perform eight gallbladder removals on pig cadavers after learning from annotated video recordings of surgeons. This proved that imitation learning could make autonomy reliable. Aleph goes further by training a single foundation model that transfers across different surgical tasks and learns from data gathered on different bodies and different robots.

The company was founded by brothers Ryan and Dylan McGuire; Dylan previously worked as an engineer at Palantir, a major data analytics company. Their bet is unusual: most capital today flows into warehouse and logistics robots, where labor is cheap and plentiful. The McGuires chose the opposite end: training a surgeon takes more than ten years and millions of dollars, and access to quality surgical care is unevenly distributed worldwide.

Other startups share this bet, and the risks are concrete. Andromeda Surgical, a Y Combinator graduate, raised a $15M Series A in August 2026, so Aleph is not alone. Vicarious Surgical, backed by Bill Gates, raised $300M for a remotely operated VR system (exactly the approach Aleph rejected) and went bankrupt this year.

Vitalism Foundation is a nonprofit founded by Adam Gries and Nathan Cheng. They publicly advocate spending at least 1% of global GDP per year to fight aging and say they invest only in founders who share that goal. Gries has made a similar argument in response to cardiologist Eric Topol: aging remains compulsory, and the money belongs in biology, not slogans. Aleph's official round announcement does not list Vitalism Foundation among the eight participants, but Gries called it an investment of the movement: "This is one of Vitalism Foundation's early investments, and they are doing important work on the critical path to human flourishing and longevity," he wrote in his post about the deal.

Aleph's round ranks in the top 9% of robotics seed deals by size in recorded history. The vitalist logic is that surgery is as much a bottleneck on the path to a long healthy life as the unsolved mechanisms of aging are: a drug against an age-related disease is useless to a patient if there is physically no one available to perform the operation that should save them.