Medical devices & diagnostics · Surgical navigation
Illuminant Surgical
A projector on a boom arm that paints a patient’s scan onto their own skin while the surgeon works. Nearly $2.93 million in federal grants sits behind it, an $8.4 million seed was announced in April 2026, and the FDA has cleared nothing yet.
A tattoo made of light
Picture a cart at the foot of the operating table. A boom arm reaches over the patient and ends in an optical head aimed at the square of skin the surgeon is about to open. Switch it on and it behaves like a surgical lamp, except that what comes out of it is the patient’s own CT scan, shaped to the curve of the back it lands on.
“You can create synthetic fluoroscopy-based views and project them directly on the patient’s back. It’s almost like a tattoo on your skin.” That is co-founder Eldrick Millares describing the Skylight platform to a medtech research firm in January 2026.
Two pieces make it work. SkinMatch is a set of adhesive markers, which the company calls SkinDots, plus the computer vision that locks a stored scan onto a living body. LightScreen is the projection side, redrawing the image many times a second as the patient breathes and the table shifts. Nobody wears anything: no headset, no goggles, no second monitor. That absence is the pitch.
The cost of looking away
Image guided surgery has a geometry problem nobody has solved elegantly. The scan lives on a screen, the patient lives on the table, and a surgeon holds the mental model in between.
The company’s own NSF Phase I abstract, a public record, puts the stakes for lumbar spine work bluntly: inaccurate interventions produce reoperation rates of up to 16 percent, and readmissions cost nearly $15 billion in direct and indirect costs. The April 2026 release goes further, claiming “1 in 5 spine surgeries requires a revision, 1 in 10 biopsies misses a cancer diagnosis, and 1 in 2 pain interventions fails to relieve symptoms.” Those three figures are company-stated and carry no citation.
The second problem is economic. A 2023 cost-benefit paper in the Journal of Medical Systems, with James Hu among the authors, modeled Medtronic’s StealthStation and O-arm and calculated the case volume needed to justify buying one: 158 spinal surgeries a year at zero private-payer reimbursement for revisions, 352 at full reimbursement. On those numbers 61 percent of US inpatient facilities cannot justify 3D navigation, and at full reimbursement 86 percent cannot. That paper is the company’s market thesis, in a peer-reviewed journal. Navigation works. Most hospitals cannot afford it.
Two dormmates
Hu and Millares met as freshman dormmates at Stanford and have worked together for more than a decade. Millares trained as an electrical engineer, started on lidar sensors for self-driving cars, then worked on Apple’s M-series chips. Hu studied bioengineering at Stanford and took his MD at UC Irvine while the startup was already running. “Imagine 80-, 90-hour work weeks where he had to drive from Orange and Irvine all the way up to our offices in Culver City,” Millares said of that stretch.
The engineering hires came from an unusual place. Illuminant staffed its software team out of graphics and video games rather than medtech, on the theory that people who animate skin and skeletons for films already solve the problem the operating room needs solved. The team presented a poster on Skylight at SIGGRAPH 2025 in Vancouver.
Millares grew up in West Virginia after emigrating from the Philippines. Forbes named both founders to its 30 Under 30 Healthcare list on December 2, 2025. Hu was 29, Millares 28.
Four addresses and a cadaver lab
The paper trail moves the company around. Two 2023 journal articles list Illuminant Surgical in Cambridge, Massachusetts. NSF and NIH records put the awardee at 855 El Camino Real in Palo Alto. By 2025 the website and the papers say Los Angeles.
The federal money arrived in sequence. NSF awarded $274,865 for a Phase I in January 2024, then $1,250,000 for a Phase II in August 2025. The National Institute on Aging put $294,992 into a Phase I in September 2024 to build a deformable registration pipeline and test it on cadavers. The National Cancer Institute added $1,107,943 in September 2025 to extend the platform to image-guided biopsy. Hu is principal investigator on all four.
Then the private round. On April 30, 2026 the company announced $8.4 million in seed funding led by Wing 2 Wing Ventures, with Elderberry Ventures, Soma Capital and DRF named alongside the three federal agencies. In June it cut a ribbon on a 12,000 square foot Los Angeles headquarters holding R&D labs, pilot manufacturing lines and a BSL-2 cadaver lab, and said the first production-equivalent units for an FDA submission were complete.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| FDA status | No 510(k) and no PMA for any applicant named Illuminant in the openFDA device databases, searched Sep 22, 2026. The website states Skylight “has not been approved or cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is not available for sale or commercial use.” | Public record |
| Registered trials | ClinicalTrials.gov returns no studies for Illuminant Surgical and none for Skylight as a navigation system, searched Sep 22, 2026. | Not found |
| Federal grants | NSF 2321906, $274,865, 2024. NSF 2507300, $1,250,000, Aug 2025 to Jul 2027. NIA R43AG085917, $294,992, FY2024. NCI R44CA310355, $1,107,943, FY2025 to Aug 2028. Total $2,927,800. | Public record |
| Device testing in print | One study. World Neurosurgery, June 2023: 20 medical students placed external ventricular drains on an anatomic head model with or without a camera-projector system. The navigated group found Kocher’s point about 130 seconds faster (P below 0.001), mean error 8.0 mm versus 23.6 mm. | Public record |
| Animal and cadaver work | Company describes porcine studies in which Hu placed eight pedicle screws and hit internal accuracy targets in August. No protocol, dataset or publication found. | Company-stated |
| Accuracy figures | Sub-millimeter registration with SkinDots and millimeter-level projection accuracy. A May 2025 company post describes guidance at “sub-two millimeter accuracy.” No independent measurement found. | Company-stated |
| Funding on file | $8.4 million seed announced Apr 30, 2026. SEC EDGAR returns no company matching Illuminant and zero full-text hits for the phrase Illuminant Surgical as of Sep 22, 2026. | No filing found |
| Competitive field | Medtronic cleared its Stealth AXiS planning, navigation and robotics platform on Feb 13, 2026, on what it calls more than 50 years of navigation leadership. | Public record |
Read plainly: the federal peer review is real and the engineering is documented, but every claim about how Skylight performs on a human being is still a company claim. The one randomized comparison in print used medical students and a plastic head. The animal work exists only in interview form.
What to watch
- An FDA 510(k) submission and the predicate it names.
- A Form D, or an explanation of its absence. An $8.4 million round with no Regulation D notice is unusual enough to be worth resolving.
- Cadaver data from the NIA award, which funded exactly that, and whether it reaches a journal.
- A named hospital or ambulatory surgery center, since the affordability argument only works if smaller facilities buy.
In their words
“We built Skylight to help doctors avoid those errors, streamline every step, and operate with millimeter-level precision where it matters most.”
Dr. James Hu, co-founder and co-CEO, April 2026 funding release · Company release
“Our mission from day one has been to build technology that doctors actually want to use and to deliver it in a way that makes adoption effortless.”
Eldrick Millares, co-founder and co-CEO, quoted by the Los Angeles Times, 2026 · Independent
“We want to bring that same technology into medicine to understand how bones move in real time, how skin and tissue behave, and ultimately achieve X-ray vision into the human body.”
Eldrick Millares, Life Science Intelligence interview, 2026 · Interview
“We’ve developed little stickers you can put onto the patient’s back, arrange them in any pattern, and use them to align the medical image to the patient with sub-millimeter accuracy.”
Eldrick Millares, Life Science Intelligence interview, 2026 · Interview
“He placed eight screws, all right down the middle, achieving our accuracy targets.”
Eldrick Millares on porcine testing, Life Science Intelligence, 2026 · Interview
“In the next few months, we’re looking to build our V&V units, complete the canonical set of testing, and then take all that data and submit it to the FDA.”
Eldrick Millares, Life Science Intelligence interview, January 2026 · Interview
“Illuminant is tackling one of the most persistent challenges in modern medicine with a solution that is both technically elegant and clinically impactful.”
Max Knapp, managing director, Wing 2 Wing Ventures, 2026 · Investor, in release
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordNSF SBIR awards 2507300 and 2321906
- Public recordNIH RePORTER R44CA310355 and R43AG085917
- Public recordopenFDA 510(k) and PMA searches, applicant Illuminant
- Public recordClinicalTrials.gov search
- Public recordSEC EDGAR company and full text search
- Public recordExternal Ventricular Drain Placement Teleproctoring Using a Camera-Projector System
- Public recordCase Volume Justification of 3D-Navigated Spinal Procedures
- Public recordLumbar spine deformation between prone and supine CTs
- Public recordMedtronic FDA clearance for Stealth AXiS
- InterviewThe Memo: Illuminant Surgical Bringing X-Ray Vision to the Body
- Independent30 Under 30 Healthcare 2026
- IndependentIlluminant Surgical raises $8.4M for image-based surgical guidance
- IndependentStanford-Founded Illuminant Surgical Backed by $8.4M
- IndependentIlluminant Surgical Raises $8.4M in Seed Funding
- CompanyGiving Doctors X-Ray Vision: Illuminant Surgical Raises $8.4M
- CompanyIlluminant Surgical launch page
- CompanyIlluminant Surgical website and company posts
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
