Asensus Surgical Brand Guidelines: TransEnterix, Senhance & the 2024 Karl Storz Deal

A single-port device, then a robot.

Asensus Surgical started life under another name: TransEnterix, a medical-device company in the Research Triangle of North Carolina. The earliest trace in the US Food and Drug Administration’s public 510(k) database is a clearance dated July 2009 for the company’s SPIDER single-port surgical device, filed from Durham. Further SPIDER instruments followed through 2012, filed from Durham and later from Morrisville — the town that appears on the company’s filings for most of the next decade.

The product that defined the company was a robot rather than a hand instrument: the Senhance Surgical System. The Orlando Sentinel reported in November 2017 that the system had been in development for about a decade and had become commercially available in several countries in Europe and Asia late in 2016. The Robot Report noted a sale in Taiwan in the third quarter of 2017, and in 2018 quoted the chief of surgery at St. Marien Hospital in Siegen, Germany, on his hospital’s use of the system across general, upper gastrointestinal and colorectal surgery.

The American step came on 13 October 2017, the date of the FDA 510(k) clearance listed for the “Senhance Surgical Robotic System.” The Orlando Sentinel described it as the first robotic system to receive US government approval in two decades, since the da Vinci robot made by Intuitive. The first American buyer was Florida Hospital in Orlando, which the Sentinel reported in November 2017, and which The Robot Report said came exactly one month after the clearance.

Eye tracking, haptics and a new name.

The early US clearance covered laparoscopic colorectal and gynecologic surgery. In May 2018 The Robot Report reported that the FDA had widened the indications to inguinal hernia repair and gallbladder removal, quoting Todd M. Pope, then president and chief executive of TransEnterix. A year later the magazine reported that AdventHealth for Women, part of the renamed Florida Hospital system, had become the first health system in Florida to use Senhance for gynecological procedures.

Press coverage at launch dwelt on how the system was controlled. The Orlando Sentinel described eye-tracking technology that let surgeons move the laparoscopic camera with their eyes. Florida Hospital’s own announcement, published by Florida Trend in November 2017, said the controls were modelled on traditional laparoscopic instruments and that the surgeon sat at a console with 3D visualisation. English Wikipedia’s article on robotic surgery notes that Senhance was developed with haptic feedback. In 2019 the company told The Robot Report that the system could use 3-millimetre instruments, smaller than those typical of earlier robotic systems.

The name changed in 2021. FDA filings for Senhance are listed under TransEnterix up to a clearance in March 2021; from July 2021 the applicant is Asensus Surgical, Inc., with an address in Durham. The new name came with a new vocabulary. The company described itself as working on “Performance-Guided Surgery,” a phrase it marked as a trademark, and on an Intelligent Surgical Unit, a digital module that Karl Storz described in 2023 as something it intended to sell on its own alongside its Image1 S imaging system and OR1 operating-room integration.

The Senhance name itself never changed. Clearances for the system and its accessories run through the FDA database from 2017 into the 2020s, the latest under the Asensus name dated May 2026, for a Senhance ultrasonic system.

The category.

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.

From listed company to Karl Storz subsidiary.

The path to new ownership began in February 2023. Karl Storz, the family-owned endoscopy company founded in 1945 in Tuttlingen, Germany, announced a new robotics subsidiary, Karl Storz VentureONE, based in Singapore with a second site in Munich. Its first step, the company said, was a memorandum of understanding with Asensus Surgical covering the Intelligent Surgical Unit and joint work on next-generation robotic instruments.

The full acquisition closed on 22 August 2024. According to the closing announcement published by Karl Storz, its American subsidiary Karl Storz Endoscopy-America acquired all outstanding Asensus shares after a vote of Asensus stockholders; Asensus became a subsidiary of Karl Storz, and its stock, listed on the NYSE American exchange under the ticker ASXC, stopped trading. The announcement named Anthony Fernando as president and chief executive of Asensus and Karl-Christian Storz as chief executive of Karl Storz. The release said Karl Storz was welcoming more than 200 Asensus staff, and described LUNA as a second-generation system then under development that had not been submitted to or cleared by the FDA or other regulators. English Wikipedia’s article on Karl Storz says the purchase was made to expand the German company’s robotic surgery division.

Asensus Surgical no longer trades as an independent, listed company. Its former web address now forwards to the Karl Storz website, while the Asensus Surgical name continues on US regulatory filings for Senhance products, filed from Durham.

For a design guide, Asensus Surgical shows how a robotics name can be rebuilt twice around a single product: TransEnterix, then Asensus, then a unit inside a German family company, while the Senhance name stays fixed throughout. Compare Intuitive, whose da Vinci system was the US benchmark at Senhance’s launch, and Distalmotion, another laparoscopy-minded robot maker. For this guide we use theatre navy, drape blue and instrument steel with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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