What if a robot could give a surgeon steadier hands for the movements too small to see or feel? That question, asked during Daniel Bautista's PhD at Imperial College London, became Symmetry Surgical.

Current surgery depends heavily on a surgeon's mechanical skill, and tiny differences in speed or angle change how a patient hears, sees and recovers. Daniel's team is building a compact robotic platform that extends the surgeon without disrupting the operation, starting with cochlear implant surgery and preserving the hearing patients have left.

This episode follows the six-to-seven-year journey from lab to launch: negotiating an exclusive IP licence with the university, getting from controlled experiments to a product a surgeon can use on a cadaveric specimen, surviving the cycle of nearly running out of money, and collecting investor n ...