Corbotics, an EIC Accelerator Winner, Automates Heart Ultrasound

The transthoracic echocardiogram, the ultrasound scan of the heart through the chest wall, is in Corbotics' words the most widely used imaging test in heart failure care, and the CORDIS summary of its project says millions are performed in Europe each year by sonographers or cardiologists holding the probe. Corbotics, a Delft medical robotics company, has built a bed with an opening under the chest and a robot arm beneath it that moves a standard ultrasound probe on its own, collecting the full set of views that a sonographer would otherwise record by hand.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, Bed Based Echo, at its 1 October 2025 cut-off for blended finance, one of 61 companies the EIC said on 17 February 2026 it had chosen from 121 interviewed. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,499,288.75 under a grant agreement signed on 29 May 2026, for a project running from 1 June 2026 to 29 February 2028. The company announced the €2.5 million grant on 27 February 2026; neither CORDIS nor the company states the size of any equity component, and no EIC Fund investment in Corbotics could be found in a web search of fund announcements on 4 November 2026.

A bed with a hole, and a robot under it

According to the trial registration, the robot is mounted under a specially designed bed with an opening for the thorax, and the patient lies prone and then on the left side so the arm can reach the parasternal, subcostal and apical windows. The company's EIC announcement describes autonomous positioning of the transducer and automated optimisation of the ultrasound settings, and the CORDIS summary says machine learning models, trained on images from a volunteer campaign, decide the probe's path and angle.

What the robot does not do is diagnose. CEO Adriaan van Donk said at LSI Europe in 2024 that the system acquires about 40 clips and leaves the reading to cardiologists, that an assistant or nurse prepares the patient, that a contract manufacturer builds the hardware, and that the company holds patents in Europe and the United States. He also said no competitor offered a similar product. Robotic echo probes are a research field elsewhere, including a robot-arm study at Amsterdam UMC presented at ESC Congress 2023 and a prone-position probe manipulator published in 2024, but no other company selling an autonomous bed-based system came up in the searches for this article.

The first clinical numbers come from an abstract presented at ESC Heart Failure 2026 in Barcelona, which the company announced as a Young Investigator Award presentation on 10 May 2026. In the first 25 consecutive patients at a single centre, each scanned both manually and by the robot on a 41-clip protocol, the autonomous exams obtained 99.8% of the required clips in a mean of 27.4 minutes, with a mean peak probe force of 13.8 newtons and no serious device-related adverse events. Two of the ten authors, Stefan Bonhof and Robert Riezebos, carry the same names as Corbotics' product and medical chiefs on the company's team page. The abstract, as listed, reports clip capture, exam time and probe force, not whether a cardiologist could use the images.

The study is finished; the result is not public

That second question is the trial's primary endpoint. The Dutch trial register (NL-OMON56962, CCMO NL86788.000.24) describes a multicentre, non-randomised, single-arm study sponsored and funded by Corbotics, approved by the METC Leiden-Den Haag-Delft on 21 August 2024. It measures the share of autonomous exams rated clinically usable, a score of 3 or more on a five-point scale by EACVI-certified evaluators, among patients whose manual exam on the same system was usable. The register calls it a first-in-human feasibility study; the company calls it its pivotal trial.

Corbotics announced the start at UMC Utrecht on 10 October 2024 with 300 patients planned, naming LUMC, OLVG, Haga, Isala and Catharina as further sites. When it announced completed enrolment on 11 August 2026, it gave 256 patients at five centres: Erasmus MC, Haga, UMC Utrecht, Catharina and Reinier de Graaf. The register, last updated on 3 October 2026, lists recruitment as stopped and actual enrolment as 416, with site targets that add up to 414. The planned end date in the register was 28 February 2026. No source consulted explains the gap between 256 and 416, and the company says results will follow in a scientific article and a clinical investigation report once analysis is complete.

Approval was targeted for mid-2026

At LSI Europe in late 2024, van Donk said the company was targeting regulatory approval in both the EU and the US by mid-2026. Since then Corbotics has announced ISO 13485 certification by BSI on 16 July 2026, an FDA Breakthrough Device Designation on 30 July 2026 and passed IEC 60601 electrical safety testing on 23 September 2026. The breakthrough designation is reported only by the company and by its partner Us2.ai, which quotes van Donk dating it to June 2026; no FDA record or independent report of it was found. In the company's own description the designation brings closer interaction with the FDA and prioritised review; it is not a clearance.

The same Us2.ai release of 30 August 2026 states that the Bed Based Echo is under clinical evaluation and is not CE marked or commercially available. The company's own website says the same: the product is not on the market.

Grants, a soft loan and undisclosed equity

The funding Corbotics has announced comes from public and regional grants, a bank soft loan and shareholders. In January 2024 it announced €1.1 million made up of a €500,000 Kansen voor West grant, which is EU co-funded, a Rabobank soft loan and an unnamed investor. Van Donk told LSI in 2024 that the company had raised about €3.5 million in total, had runway until the end of 2025 and was seeking €8 million; he described a launch customer, named in the machine transcript as DC Clinic, as also a strategic investor, a claim no second source could confirm. In October 2025 the company announced an Innovation Credit from RVO, the Dutch enterprise agency, without an amount, and in July 2026 a new round backed largely by existing shareholders, also without an amount, which together with the grants it says funds operations until the first quarter of 2028.

The balance sheets, as shown by liza.nl from the KvK filings, grew over the same period. Equity rose from €358,511 at the end of 2022 to €1,127,712 in 2023, €1,960,802 in 2024 and €2,099,415 in 2025, while the balance sheet total went from €483,173 to €3,173,404 and debts from €124,662 to €806,947. The figures shown include no revenue or profit and loss line. OpenCorporates lists the company as active, and no bankruptcy record appeared in either source.

The EIC project against the record

1. Autonomous acquisition of a full TTEDemonstrated99.8% of required clips in 25 patients, per the ESC Heart Failure abstract.
2. Clinically usable images versus manual scansNot publishedPrimary endpoint of NL-OMON56962; enrolment closed, no result released.
3. Outperform manual scans on accuracy, speed and costClaimCORDIS objective; the only timing figure public is 27.4 minutes per autonomous exam.
4. Market approvalIn progressISO 13485 and IEC 60601 per the company; not CE marked, per Us2.ai.
5. Customers in the Netherlands and SpainLetters of intentCORDIS cites letters of intent; the company has announced no sale.

The grant agreement has 16 months to run, so none of this is a verdict on the project. The commercial partnerships point at the market the company wants: a proof-of-concept collaboration with GE Healthcare announced in June 2025, without terms, and the Us2.ai distribution agreement covering the US, the EU and the UK, pairing the robot's acquisition with Us2.ai's FDA-cleared analysis software.

Where it fits in EU health policy

The European Commission unveiled its Safe Hearts Plan on 16 December 2025, which it calls the first EU approach to cardiovascular disease. The Commission puts the toll at 1.7 million deaths and more than €282 billion a year, and the plan includes an EU protocol on cardiovascular health checks, followed on 28 September 2026 by a proposed Council recommendation. The World Heart Federation describes early detection as one of its three areas. The CORDIS summary blames staff shortages for long waiting times for exactly this scan. That is the gap Corbotics says it can fill; whether its robot's images are good enough to fill it is what the unpublished trial result will show.

The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.