About

ORamaVR was created to tackle a major health crisis that is currently affecting almost 5B people globally: the lack of access to affordable surgical care. This health crisis is the direct result of a lack of innovation in medical training over the last 150 years that has meant that the profession can’t keep up with the demand. The WHO is projecting that by 2030, there will be a staggering deficit of 18 million medical professionals. Meanwhile, the number of fatal medical errors keeps rising due to the fact that medical training is highly intensive: a master/ educator operates on a patient and the trainee/ apprentice observes and learns on-the-job, often practicing on real patients. Medical virtual reality (VR) training can change all that. Clinical studies have proven that medical VR training improves patient outcomes; however, current VR content creation cannot keep up with the demand, due to: a) lengthy content creation times b) high authoring costs and c) a very large number of different medical operations that need to be simulated in VR.

Solution & Product

ORamaVR aims to accelerate the world’s transition to medical VR training by offering an IT software platform called MAGES™ SDK (Software Development Kit). This platform empowers institutions and developers to massively create high fidelity medical Virtual Reality Simulations 8 times faster and for one eighth of the cost relative to current industry standards. These state-of-the-art simulations can thus quickly and more affordably be made available to hospitals, medical device companies, medical schools and medical training centres to train and assess their medical professionals. The outstanding benefits of this award-winning platform (MAGES SDK) have been demonstrated in 4 published clinical trials. Aside from drastically reducing development costs and delays, the platform has been proven to provide effective skills transfer from the virtual to the real operating table.

Innovation & Scalability

As VR is becoming more refined and accessible, the benefits of incorporating this engaging and highly scalable technology into medical training programs are widely discussed and acknowledged. The number of professional VR content providers is growing steadily, yet the fundamentals of content creation are the reason VR education is not yet a mainstream option in medical training. The gap between growing shortage of health workers and what the existing medical training system can supply is too wide to be filled with the existing VR content creation technologies. Truly useful and comprehensive medical training would require tens of VR modules per each procedure. The process of building virtual settings is time-consuming and costly -creating a single operation module takes months of work by multiple developers and designers, and eventually highly costly. The MAGES Software Development Kit (SDK) allows code-free/low-code creation of hyper-realistic VR simulations of medical operations by medical professionals in a matter of hours. This makes it possible to create a rich collection of detailed training modules, a base for a leap forward in virtual medical education landscape. With MAGES, medical professionals need to create and model only a storyline using our custom visual scripting editor and record their actions within the VR scene while interacting with the virtual patient and virtual OR equipment, making it a catalyst for the most effective, yet risk-free medical training.

Traction & achievements

ORamaVR was founded in 2016 and received initial €575K pre-seed financing from the VC PJ TECH CATALYST FUND in Greece. The company has moved its HQ to Geneva, Switzerland upon strategic partners' demand. ORamaVR is adopted by the USC Keck School of Medicine, Los Angeles, NYU Langone Medical centre in New York, the University of Geneva and the Inselspital Hospital system in Switzerland, FORTH and the University of Athens in Greece and recently Western Governors University, Fayetteville State University and the University of Michigan in USA. Medacta International, a leading Swiss medical implant manufacturer expressed high interest to collaborate intensively with ORamaVR. ORamaVR has been awarded in 2020 an Epic Games Mega-Grant, in 2019 the Augmented World Expo (AWE) Auggie award for "Best Societal Impact” and the prestigious FARE award, from the American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons (AAHKS) in 2018. ORamaVR has attracted more than €1.3M in R&D grants and awards up to date. In 2020 ORamaVR concluded a €370K bridge round led by HTC Vive, a leader in enterprise virtual reality.

Team & Why Us

Our team has decades of engineering and commercialisation experience in VR applications and education technologies. The team members have established multiple enterprises, managed them, or contributed otherwise in leading positions. At the same time, ORamaVR team members are world-renown researchers in VR, computer graphics, robotics, and medical sciences. Some of the achievements of the team include: - 3 deep-tech companies established and 1 exit completed; - A total of €30M raised by team members in various ventures; - 250 high impact journal scientific publications co-authored.

Funding Needs

We have managed to raise more than €2.5 million, based on €575K initial pre-seed VC financing, €400K from the recent bridge round led by HTC Vive and €1.7 million on competitive R&D grants. In Q3 2022 we raised €2,4M non-dilutive. A next €2,500,000 investment will allow us to become market leaders.