Johnson & Johnson Awards First Surgical AI Grants Through Polyphonic Fund
- Mayo Clinic and QAS.AI named inaugural winners of the Polyphonic AI Fund for Surgery QuickFire Challenge.
- Selected projects aim to detect surgical site infections and enhance vascular imaging analysis during operations.
Johnson & Johnson MedTech has named the first awardees of its Polyphonic AI Fund for Surgery, launched in June 2025 to accelerate AI innovation in surgical care. Supported by NVIDIA and Amazon Web Services, the fund supports an open developer community and promotes responsible approaches to building surgical AI.
The Fund launched with a global QuickFire Challenge to surface new ideas in surgical AI. Submissions came from 29 countries and included startups, academics, and major firms. Projects explored clinical decision support, operating room efficiency, and multimodal approaches using video, imaging, audio, and patient data.
The winners of the inaugural QuickFire Challenge are Mayo Clinic and QAS.AI. Mayo Clinic is developing a computer vision model to identify post-operative wound complications across surgical specialties. QAS.AI is working on real-time decision support tools that analyze intra-operative vascular imaging, enabling clinicians to make quicker and better-informed decisions.
A second round of the QuickFire Challenge opens in October. All first-round applicants will join a network of surgical AI developers with access to mentorship, programs, and early pilots at hospitals in the Polyphonic ecosystem.
🌀 Tom’s Take:
Funds like these bring the commercial partners, the tech stack, and the money to the table, everything startups and developers need to get their ideas off the ground. In this case, it’s designed to create the right environment to figure out how AI can actually work in surgery.
Source: Johnson & Johnson
