There is a moment in every industry when the noise drops and the signal gets loud. Healthcare is in one of those moments, and Apella just turned the volume knob with an $80M Series B that feels less like a raise and more like a declaration. Founded in 2019 and based in San Francisco, Apella is doing the unglamorous work that actually moves the needle: making operating rooms run on truth instead of gut feel. Ambient AI, computer vision, and real-time operational intelligence quietly watching the room, learning the room, and giving hospitals back the rarest asset they have, which is time.
David Schummers, Cameron Marlow, and Jordan Tuttle did not stumble into this problem. David Schummers brings hard-earned perspective from Auris Health and years inside medical device companies where inefficiency shows up on the balance sheet and in patient outcomes. Cameron Marlow comes from building data science at Facebook and MIT Media Lab, which explains why Apella sees patterns humans miss and does not flinch. Jordan Tuttle spent decades in medical devices and biotech learning how hospitals actually buy, deploy, and scale technology when failure is not an option. Different paths, same obsession: remove friction without adding burden.
HighlandX led the round, and Corey Mulloy joining the board is not a ceremonial nod, it is an operational wager. Returning conviction from Vensana Capital, Casdin Capital, PFM Health Sciences, Upside Partnership, and Operator Partners says this story compounds. New capital from K2 HealthVentures, OpAmp Capital, and Houston Methodist tightens the loop between builder, buyer, and believer. When a nine-hospital system scales from a 36-room pilot to more than 200 operating rooms and then invests, that is not optimism, that is proof.
Apella has already supported 500,000 surgical cases. Hospitals using the platform are seeing a 5% increase in surgical volume without squeezing clinicians harder. The system detects operating room events with 99% accuracy in under one minute and predicts surgery duration 24% better than electronic health records. Tampa General Hospital is saving thousands of minutes every week and adding hundreds of procedures every year. This is not AI theater. This is math meeting muscle memory.
The Horizon module widens the lens, turning case duration, utilization, staffing, and capacity into something schedulers can trust. Expansion beyond operating rooms into interventional radiology, cardiology, and endoscopy is not ambition for headlines. It reflects a simple truth: procedures do not happen in isolation, and neither should the intelligence that runs them.
Healthcare is staring down an 11M worker shortage by 2030. You do not solve that with slogans. You solve it by making every room smarter, every minute accountable, and every clinician less buried in clicks. Apella is not trying to be loud. It is trying to be right. And right now, the signal is getting harder to ignore.
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