Phillip Mohabir spent years helping IMAX digitize and scale globally by replacing bulky film projectors with sleek digital systems that redefined the cinematic experience. But he never expected that same playbook—digitize, distribute, optimize—would lead him from movie theatres to operating theatres.
“The way we watched movies for the last hundred years didn’t change until digital projection. It’s remarkably similar to how we’ve trained surgeons,” said Mohabir. “Surgical education has been virtually unchanged for a century.”
At IMAX, digitization not only enhanced visuals, but it also produced a stream of operational data that changed how the company made decisions. Mohabir saw a parallel in surgery: minimally invasive procedures had already shifted the surgeon’s view from the patient to a screen. What was missing was the infrastructure to capture, analyze, and learn from it.
“When you have a digital product, you get better data,” he said. “And with better data, you make better decisions. Surgery was ripe for transformation.”
Now, as co-founder and CEO of Vivo Surgery, Mohabir is applying those lessons to the operating room. His team is building a platform that allows surgeons to stream and capture procedures while generating structured data that can improve training and reduce complications.
Pandemic workaround becomes a platform
The idea for Vivo Surgery began during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Mohabir’s co-founder, neurosurgeon Dr. Aleksa Cenic, needed a way for students to shadow him despite pandemic hospital restrictions. Mohabir was brought in to determine whether the problem was temporary or systemic of a bigger issue with surgical training.
“After interviewing more than 30 surgeons and students, it became clear that surgical exposure and training bottlenecks existed long before the pandemic,” he said. “That was our first sign we were onto something bigger.”
Streaming with purpose
Vivo Surgery’s platform lets surgical staff and medical observers watch surgeries remotely in high definition, often from multiple angles. Operating surgeons narrate the procedures in real time, which allows viewers to follow each step and ask questions.
“We found a way to incentivize a surgeon to talk through an entire surgery,” said Mohabir. “You’re actually able to interact and ask questions, but also hear the surgeon walk you through step by step.”
That level of engagement is also generating valuable data. Using the power of Google Cloud, Vivo is now building AI tools that can annotate surgeries in real time, opening new possibilities for clinical documentation, training models, and post-op analysis.
Solving a $52.4 billion problem
Surgical complications and readmissions are a persistent issue in health care. In the U.S. alone, readmissions cost the system $52.4 billion annually. Mohabir said about 20 per cent of that can be tied to surgical cases and a significant portion of those cases could be preventable.
“The idea is, can we learn things during the surgery that are predictive of whether or not a person is susceptible for readmission, and can we act in that time in between to prevent them from being readmitted?”
In some cases, subtle indicators in patient vitals or surgical footage could trigger a recommendation to keep a patient an extra day - a relatively small decision that could avoid a costly return.
Scaling through integration
Vivo Surgery is now preparing to expand on two fronts. First, it’s integrating its technology into medical device platforms already in use in hospitals. These integrations will allow the company to scale rapidly without relying on traditional sales pipelines.
“Overnight, just by integrating, you're in 100 locations,” said Mohabir. “It’s a new channel that’s made you instantly visible to 100 surgeons.”
Second, the company is finalizing agreements with two Ontario research hospitals to license its platform for internal training and research, building on its existing relationship with Hamilton Health Sciences.
Mohabir said Vivo’s plug-and-play setup and focus on surgeon autonomy have helped reduce the friction that often slows hospital adoption.
Regional support, global reach
Vivo is based in Hamilton, but much of its traction has come through Waterloo Region and the broader Southern Ontario startup ecosystem.
“We’ve been part of four accelerator groups, the Accelerator Centre, Innovation Factory, MaRS Health and Altitude Accelerator,” said Mohabir. “That support has been critical for us..”
Mohabir also credits the ecosystem and various programs for facilitating important introductions and early sales conversations.
“We’d probably spend three or four years trying to build that kind of trust on our own,” he said. “Accelerators help accelerate trust, and trust is what drives commercialization.”
Grants from the Southern Ontario Pharmaceutical & Health Innovation Ecosystem (SOPHIE) program and Hamilton Health Sciences’ DRIVE SPARK initiative provided early non-dilutive capital, while a sales agreement with McMaster University gave Vivo early revenue and runway to bootstrap for two years.
The path forward
Mohabir knows that selling into hospitals is slow. While surgeons and OR managers often act quickly, institutional procurement is complex. To accelerate adoption, Vivo is raising a pre-seed round to fund outreach and scale deployments ahead of a summer push.
“We can’t control the timing of hospital decisions,” he said. “But we can control how many relationships we build with surgeons now.”.
Trust is the business model
As a first-time founder, Mohabir’s biggest lesson is simple.
“Business moves at the speed of trust,” he said. “You could have the best product in the world—but if people don’t trust you, you’ll go nowhere.”
“At the beginning, I thought, ‘If I have a great product, solve a problem, people will gradually care.’ But if you're not building relationships along the way, it’s all for nothing.”
