Google partners with Johnson and Johnson to make lower cost surgical robots

Verb Surgical has about $500 million in investment and Alphabet (Google) and Johnson and Johnson are the primary investors.

Verb’s goal is to introduce a better, cheaper surgical robot into the market in 2020, plus a bunch of software tools for capturing insights from procedures.

Many Alphabet engineers who used to work at Project Loon (stratospheric balloons to deliver internet) are currently on loan to Verb.

The best-known surgical robot is Intuitive’s da Vinci robot. The list price for a fourth-generation da Vinci is almost $2 million.