We all dream of retirement, even surgeons. But while many of our jobs can be picked up quickly, the lifetime of experience and skill development surgeons build walks out the door with them when they leave the operating room. 

For generations, surgical training has run on the same informal apprenticeship model. 

Watch enough procedures, impress enough attendings, get the green light to operate independently. The system has produced brilliant surgeons. It has also produced uneven outcomes, unexplained biases, and a knowledge base trapped inside individual operating rooms that accumulates for decades and then, quietly and quickly evaporates.

Phillip Mohabir, co-founder and CEO of Vivo Surgery, is building the infrastructure to change that.

From livestream to surgical intelligence

Vivo Surgery began during the pandemic, when operating theatres were closed to all but essential staff and trainee surgeons had nowhere to learn. Mohabir, a digital transformation veteran who spent over a decade scaling IMAX across 85 countries, partnered with Dr. Aleksa Cenic, an academic neurosurgeon at McMaster University, to create a secure, zero-latency livestreaming platform that could extend surgical learning beyond the walls of the operating room. The initial platform was used to support learning in 14 countries. 

But the more Mohabir’s team talked to surgeons and clinicians, the more they understood they were sitting on something larger than a training tool.

“We started by solving access,” Mohabir said. “What became clear is the bigger opportunity in capturing workflows. Surgical video is already capturing what happens during a procedure. The question was how to make it useful to systems that depend on knowing what actually happened.”

That insight now sits at the center of Vivo Surgery’s next evolution.

Every minimally invasive procedure generates video from multiple devices—scopes, displays, surgical towers— each from a different manufacturer, each siloed in its own system. Vivo Surgery unifies those feeds into synchronized, structured recordings. The company is using those recordings to build an AI engine that helps clinicians, hospitals, and practices use surgical video to improve surgical quality, training, documentation, and reimbursement. 

“In surgery, one of the most underused inputs is the video that already exists,“ Mohabir said. “The next generation of surgical workflows will be built on richer inputs than human memory and manual reconstruction.”

Hamilton Health Sciences as a proving ground

The big milestone for 2026 is Vivo Surgery’s funded clinical deployment at Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS), one of Canada’s most respected academic hospital networks. The deployment, backed by OBIO EAHN, is already underway in the neurosurgery department and includes remote access to specialized procedures, the digitization of surgical teaching, and the creation of more structured ways to learn from procedural video.

For HHS, the immediate value is clear — extending access to highly specialized expertise beyond the hospital itself.

Dr. Kesava Reddy, Fellowship Director of Fellowship in Minimally Invasive Neurosurgery and Skull Base Surgery, said his team regularly hear from surgeons around the world who are eager to learn the transsphenoidal and skull base techniques developed at McMaster. 

“Many face barriers to traveling or accessing hands-on training in the operating room,” Reddy said. “The Vivo Surgery platform allows us to bridge that gap, connecting with colleagues across the globe in a meaningful and scalable way. It enables us to share our experience with surgeons who are deeply committed to improving care for their patients, regardless of geography. Ultimately, it gives us a powerful avenue to pass on our knowledge to the next generation of neurosurgeons, which is what advancing the field is all about.” 

The hospital is also exploring how recorded and annotated procedures can support a more structured, repeatable approach to training. Dr. Blake Yarascavitch, McMaster Department of Neurosurgery residency program director, said he sees this as a natural next step.

“Platforms like Vivo Surgery can accelerate this shift by making high-quality surgical teaching more accessible and scalable beyond the operating room. The ability to record, refine, and condense complex procedures into focused learning modules offers residents an invaluable resource they can revisit and learn from at their own pace. Ultimately, it enhances both the reach and the impact of surgical education,” Yarascavitch said. 

For Vivo Surgery, those use cases go beyond improving access and training. They validate the idea that surgical video can become an input into workflows that are currently manual, inconsistent, and difficult to scale.

“HHS matters because it lets us test this in a real clinical environment,” Mohabir said. “Training is the first visible workflow where the value becomes clear. Once surgical knowledge becomes more structured and reusable, you begin to see how the same foundation can support other workflows that matter to practices, including documentation and reimbursement.”

How Vivo Surgery is turning insights into action

For Mohabir, the success of AI in healthcare is more than simply generating insights from data. He said the companies that will come out on the other end will be the ones that use AI to help institutions run their core surgical workflows in a precise, scalable, and data-driven way.

The move to minimally invasive surgery has created the conditions to solve this. Because these procedures rely on cameras and visualization equipment rather than direct sight lines, the raw material for building AI training datasets is already being generated in operating rooms every day. 

“If a procedure is already being captured, that video should not stop at education or archival storage,” Mohabir said. “It should be able to contribute to documentation, reimbursement, and the broader systems that depend on understanding what actually happened.”

That view is already beginning to resonate with clinicians and investors.

The company is completing a pre-seed round backed by angel investors and surgeons in Canada and the U.S. who understand both the friction in current surgical workflows and the shift now underway. 

“A lot of people first saw us through the lens of training, because that was the first problem we solved,” Mohabir said. “What is becoming clearer now is that surgical video is not just educational content. It is an operational asset. Once you see it that way, the size of the opportunity changes.”

Why MIX, and why now

Mohabir came to MIX through a recommendation from the Accelerator Centre. What brought him in was the network. What keeps him there is the context.

“Business moves at the speed of trust,” he says. “These founders in MIX are able to do warm introductions, lend me their credibility to move faster, introducing me to key opinion leaders, hospital decision makers, even investors who know the medtech and health tech space.”

In a sector where the sales cycle can stretch years and every procurement decision passes through multiple layers of institutional review, that kind of social capital is a competitive advantage.

Mohabir also points to something less expected: political proximity. Health technology in Canada lives or dies based on funding decisions made by government bodies, and MIX’s growing advocacy presence means member companies are closer to those conversations than they would otherwise be.

“You could be the most innovative thing, but if it’s not on the budget or there’s no billing code for it, you’re not going to get traction,” Mohabir says. “Being closer to that conversation lets us think more holistically about what go-to-market looks like in Canada.”

There is also the longer-term opportunity Mohabir sees in the Waterloo region itself. The University of Waterloo has built a global reputation for producing engineering talent that gets recruited to Silicon Valley. Mohabir believes that same talent, redirected toward medtech, could make Waterloo a serious player in one of the largest and least crowded technology markets in the world.

“If Waterloo wants to throw its hat in the race and put that talent in the direction of medtech—a significantly bigger market with less competition because of the regulatory knowhow and relationships required—we could be very competitive,” he says.

For Vivo Surgery, the HHS deployment is the proof of concept for that broader ambition. A Canadian platform, built on Canadian data infrastructure, capturing surgical knowledge inside a Canadian academic hospital and making it available to surgeons around the world.