Two years can feel like an aeon. Especially when a company goes from not having money for staff salaries in 2023 to being listed on Nasdaq in 2025, garnering over a billion dollars in market cap.

But Sudhir Srivastava is characteristically cool about where SSI International has landed in the medical-technology pantheon. Maybe because the cardiac surgeon-turned entrepreneur is “just taking a breather” after a challenging decade. Few believed he could deliver, let alone beat the American global leader Intuitive Surgical, whose Da Vinci brand is synonymous with robotic systems.

“When I went to the government in 2015, soon after the Make-in-India initiative, I met an IAS officer who said, ‘Sir, if you are looking for money, please go somewhere else. Other than the announcement, there’s nothing else’,” recalled Srivastava.

Today, SSI is shipping a surgical system “literally every week”. At least 115 of them are deployed in India—from large hospitals such as Apollo, Medanta, Max, and Manipal to smaller ones in tier-2 towns like Moradabad—and a dozen other countries.

With a trailing 12-month revenue of $27.6 million as of June, SSI has now engaged an investment bank in New York for public fundraising. You guessed it right, SSI went public by merging with an American startup, Avra Medical Robotics, which traded on the informal, over-the-counter (OTC) market in the US.

In another instance, Vyome Therapeutics, a 15-year-old Indian biotech, listed on Nasdaq on 15 August via a reverse mergerReverse mergerWhen a private company acquires controlling stake in a listed firm. This way, the private company bypasses the traditional IPO process with an American healthcare company. Vyome needed a “clean shell”, a vacant apartment as it were, to move in with its phase-2-ready drug assets. It had already lined up a pipe investmentPipe investmentShort for private investment in public equity. Here, investors buy a listed company's restricted shares at a market discount. It allows the latter to raise the money quickly, avoiding the time and cost of going public of nearly $7.5 million, enough to cover a phase-3 trial in the US.

“Our mindset is to be capital efficient,” said Shiladitya Sengupta, co-founder and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.