Moon Surgical Brand Guidelines: A Paris Lab, MastOR & the Maestro Bedside Robot

A surgeon, a Sorbonne robotics lab and an incubator.

Moon Surgical is a Paris company. France’s national company register records Moon Surgical as created in Paris on 4 June 2019, classed as a research-and-development business. The company says it was originally called MastOR and was founded by the surgeon Professor Brice Gayet; its investor Sofinnova Partners describes the core technology as coming from joint research between Gayet and ISIR, the robotics laboratory at Sorbonne University.

The trade journal MedTech Strategist, in a December 2021 profile reprinted by Sofinnova, described Gayet as a liver and pancreas surgeon and an early adopter of laparoscopic surgery, who had spent about a decade working with ISIR on a system giving the surgeon direct control of the trocars and instruments. When Anne Osdoit, a partner at Sofinnova, visited the lab, the journal reported, the team already had a working prototype, and Gayet had set up an entity to take the technology out of the lab. Sofinnova’s incubator, MD Start, then funded the company, gave it the name Moon Surgical and transferred the intellectual property and the prototype to it, the journal said.

The company’s own timeline puts the seed funding and the start of incubation with MD Start in June 2020, with Osdoit joining as chief executive. A press release of January 2021 still described the business as “formerly MastOR.” By May 2021, the company says, an initial team of eight was in place, and in September 2021 it built its first fully integrated prototype, which it calls Apollo 12.

MedTech Strategist reported that two former Auris Health executives joined in November 2020 and January 2021: David Noonan as chief technology officer and Jeff Alvarez in an operating role. The company now describes itself as a French-American team, with offices in Paris and in San Carlos, California.

Maestro and ScoPilot.

Moon Surgical’s product is the Maestro system, a robot for laparoscopic surgery. MedTech Strategist framed the company’s approach in 2021 as “returning the surgeon to the patient’s bedside,” giving the surgeon control over all of their instruments rather than operating remotely from a console. The company says Maestro works with a wide range of off-the-shelf 5mm and 10mm instruments and scopes, and that its arms lock and unlock without pedals or clutching.

The regulatory record is public. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s 510(k) database lists a clearance for the Maestro Platform dated 2 December 2022, and further clearances for the Maestro System on 3 June 2024, 14 March 2025 and 27 June 2025, all filed from Paris. The company says the first, “First in Human” version also received the CE mark in April 2023, and that the commercial version was cleared by the FDA in June 2024. Its first clinical work took place in Belgium: the company says Professor Guy-Bernard Cadière performed 50 procedures at CHU Saint-Pierre, a public university hospital in Brussels, between May and December 2022.

Commercial use followed in France. The company says the first commercial cases were performed there in September and October 2023, and that by April 2024 two hundred procedures had been completed in a commercial pilot in France. Its press releases list an expansion into gynaecological surgery in April 2024, a first use in an ambulatory surgery centre, at Surgeon’s Point Surgery Center, in January 2025, and a launch at Lee Health in July 2025.

Software is the other strand. In March 2025 the company announced FDA clearance for ScoPilot, a feature that lets the surgeon steer the laparoscope using the instruments already in hand; Moon Surgical calls it the industry’s first AI-enhanced intraoperative capability and says it runs on NVIDIA’s Holoscan platform. A software product, Maestro Insights, is offered alongside the robot, and the company says it gained ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certifications for data security in October 2024.

Robots beside the surgeon.

Surgical robotics companies sell machines that most people will never see in use, so their public image is built from a small set of scenes. The commonest is the operating theatre itself: robot arms draped and angled over a table, a console set a few steps away, and a surgical team in scrubs around them. When the BBC reported a new British surgical robot in 2018, one of its pictures showed a surgeon steering a robot from a console.

The second scene is the surgeon’s own view. Many systems give the surgeon a 3D screen or viewer and hand controls, and company photographs often show a surgeon leaning into that viewer or working the controls, sometimes beside a screen showing the magnified view inside the body. Close-ups of instruments follow: slim shafts, small jaws and wristed tips that bend and turn, shown at a scale no visitor to a hospital would normally see.

Clean product renders do much of the remaining work. Arms, carts and consoles are shown against plain white or soft grey grounds, with a restrained palette of whites, greys and a single brand colour, so that the machine reads as precise and calm. Museums have started to collect the results; in 2023 the Science Museum in London put a surgical robot arm on show in its Engineers gallery.

The industry meets at its own congresses. In North America, the annual meeting of SAGES, the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons, is a regular venue for new systems; in Europe there is the annual congress of the EAES, the European Association for Endoscopic Surgery; and in London the Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics brings engineers and surgeons together. The companies in this guide range from established makers to closed ventures, and each guide sets out what can be checked about them.

We shoot for the Moon.

Moon Surgical is privately held and backed by venture investors. The company names Sofinnova Partners and NVIDIA as the leaders of its May 2023 funding round, and Johnson & Johnson Innovation among the investors in its 2022 round. In May 2023 it appointed Fred Moll as board chair; the company’s site describes him as a founder of Intuitive Surgical, Auris Health and Hansen Medical. In December 2024 Chris Toth joined as an independent board member, and the site now lists him as independent board chair, with Moll as an independent director. The company says the Maestro platform is available in the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom.

The brand voice is plain and confident. The company sets out three values — “We build things that matter,” “We believe the team is the product” and “We shoot for the Moon” — the last of which plays on its own name, and it speaks of creating “the OR of the future,” one that is “sustainable, efficient, and digitalized.” Its timeline describes the company’s journey as an effort “to democratize digital robotics.” The space theme runs from the company name to the codename of its first integrated prototype, Apollo 12.

For a design guide, Moon Surgical shows how a young medtech company can carry one theme — the Moon — from its name to a prototype codename and its stated values. Compare Intuitive, the da Vinci maker co-founded by Fred Moll, and Virtual Incision, another young company working to bring robotic surgery into more operating rooms. For this guide we use a midnight blue, a lunar grey and a warm ivory with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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