Pivoting Amid COVID: Immertec Secures $6M Series A Extension To Advance VR Surgical Platform

Tampa, Florida-based surgical training company Immertec was working on a slow-growth plan of securing new customers that would take it into 2021.

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Then the coronavirus appeared on the scene.

In October 2019, the company had closed a $6 million Series A and was working on expanding its virtual reality observation platform into 20 new locations over the next year, CEO Erik Maltais said in an interview with Crunchbase News.

Its VR technology offers fully immersive surgical and medical training.

“We were talking to small and medium-sized companies, but then the coronavirus happened, and all of a sudden, five of the top 10 medical device manufacturers were telling us they couldn’t do any training at all,” he said. “As a founder, my choices were go back and raise another round of funding that would take three or four months, or go back to current investors and explain how we were going to deal with the expansion.”

Immertec’s investors agreed to reopen the Series A to current investors and 20 private and angel investors. The original $3 million extension was oversubscribed and ended up being a total of $6 million, Maltais said.

Investors included Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, Benvolio Group and PAR. The extension gives the company a total of $12 million raised.

The new funding enabled Immertec to expand into new locations and bring in new hires, including a chief operating officer and other director-level team members across the operations team. The team has grown to 23, and Maltais expects to be at nearly 50 by the end of the year.

Maltais is in the contracting phase with multiple medical device manufacturers and is in the revenue generation stage now, he said.

Next up, Immertec is creating 100 units of its VR platform and deploying them across the country. In addition, the company is preparing to raise its Series B round next year.

“We plan to go from 100 to 1,000 locations, as well as internationally, as many people have expressed the struggle with training that way,” Maltais said. “We plan to provide international growth in 2021, as well as help with educational training at medical schools.”

Illustration: Dom Guzman