The CE approval opens Europe for Cornerstone Robotics as the company expands its global surgical robotics business
Updated
May 29, 2026 4:20 AM
A tray of surgical tools. PHOTO: UNSPLASH
As surgical robotics companies expand beyond domestic markets, regulatory approvals are becoming a critical part of global growth. Companies are no longer competing only on hardware and clinical performance. They are also competing on their ability to enter tightly regulated healthcare systems and build long-term hospital partnerships.
Hong Kong-based Cornerstone Robotics is now moving further into that phase of expansion after its Sentire Endoscopic Surgical System received CE Mark certification under the European Union’s Medical Device Regulation framework.
The approval allows the company to commercialize the system across European markets for minimally invasive procedures in general surgery, gynecology, thoracic surgery and urology. For surgical robotics companies, regulatory approvals often represent more than product validation. They also determine market access, hospital adoption opportunities and long-term commercial scale.
Cornerstone Robotics has already been building clinical operations in the UK ahead of the approval. Since 2025, the company has worked with Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust on clinical investigations involving the Sentire Surgical System. According to the company, the system has been used across procedures involving urology, gynecology and gastrointestinal surgery. The company says the clinical investigation helped generate real-world data to support physician training, research and future adoption efforts.
Alongside the regulatory approval, Cornerstone Robotics is also expanding its local operations in Europe. The company established a UK subsidiary in 2025 and has been developing training, clinical support and after-sales service capabilities for hospitals using the system.
That operational buildout reflects a larger challenge inside surgical robotics. Hospitals adopting robotic systems often require ongoing clinical training, technical support and workflow integration alongside the hardware itself.
Cornerstone Robotics says its strategy centers around vertically integrated development across engineering, software, imaging and robotics systems. The company argues that this structure gives it greater control over product development, supply chain management and long-term operational stability.
Professor Samuel Au, Founder and CEO of Cornerstone Robotics, said: "Receiving CE Certification marks a major milestone in Cornerstone Robotics' evolution from a technology innovator to a global clinical solutions provider. From our first clinical investigation in Portsmouth, UK, to achieving European regulatory approval, each step of the journey reflects our commitment to proprietary innovation, product excellence, and clinical value. Looking ahead, we will continue expanding into key global markets and partnering with leading medical institutions to bring high-quality surgical robotic solutions to more physicians and patients worldwide."
The CE approval also comes several months after the company completed an oversubscribed financing round of approximately US$200 million in November 2025.
The funding and regulatory expansion together signal how surgical robotics companies are increasingly entering a more commercially focused stage of growth. Beyond research and development, companies are now investing more heavily in regulatory approvals, hospital partnerships, physician training and international operational infrastructure as competition expands across global healthcare markets.
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As workplace knowledge spreads across chats, AI firms are building systems that can structure, retrieve and preserve it over time.
Updated
May 26, 2026 5:40 PM
A messaging app on a phone. PHOTO: ADOBE STOCK
Votee AI, an enterprise AI company headquartered in Hong Kong, has partnered with its Toronto-based research lab Beever AI to launch Beever Atlas. The new platform is designed to turn workplace chats into searchable knowledge that AI systems can retrieve and understand.
The release focuses on a growing issue inside organisations. Much of today’s workplace knowledge now exists inside chat platforms such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord and Telegram. Important discussions, project decisions and technical information often disappear into long message histories that are difficult to search later.
Beever AI developed the platform to organise those conversations into a structured system for AI assistants. The software connects with Telegram, Discord, Mattermost, Microsoft Teams and Slack, then converts conversations into linked records of people, projects, files and decisions.
The collaboration combines Votee AI’s enterprise infrastructure work with Beever AI’s research around AI memory systems. The companies are releasing two versions of the product. The open-source edition is aimed at individual developers, researchers and creators. The enterprise edition is designed for banks, government agencies and larger organisations with stricter security requirements.
The release also reflects a broader shift happening across the AI industry. Companies are increasingly looking at how AI systems store and retrieve long-term knowledge, rather than relying solely on large context windows or search-based retrieval.
Earlier this year, OpenAI founding member and former director of AI at Tesla Andrej Karpathy discussed the growing need for what he described as “LLM Knowledge Bases.” He argued that AI systems need structured and evolving memory rather than depending only on context windows and vector search.
Beever Atlas approaches that problem through workplace communication. Instead of focusing mainly on uploaded files, the system is designed around conversations that happen daily across team chat platforms. It can also process images, PDFs, voice notes and video files within the same searchable system.
The companies say the software is designed to work directly with AI assistants and coding tools such as Cursor, AWS Kiro and Qwen Code. Integrations for OpenClaw and Hermes Agent are expected later in 2026.
Pak-Sun Ting, Co-Founder and CEO of Votee AI said: "Hong Kong has always been known for property and finance. Beever Atlas is proof that world-class AI infrastructure can emerge from an HK-headquartered company and be shared openly with the world. Every growing organization faces the same silent liability: conversational knowledge loss. Beever Atlas turns this perishable resource into a compounding organizational asset."
A large part of the enterprise version focuses on privacy and access control. The system mirrors permissions from Slack and Microsoft Teams so users can only retrieve information they are already authorised to access. Permission updates are reflected automatically when access changes inside company systems.
The enterprise edition also includes audit logs, encryption controls and data retention settings for organisations handling sensitive internal data. Companies can run the software entirely inside their own infrastructure using Docker and connect it to their preferred AI models through LiteLLM.
The companies argue that organising information is more useful than simply storing chat archives. Jacky Chan Co-Founder and CTO of Votee AI said: "The key technical decision was to treat agent memory as a knowledge engineering problem, not a retrieval problem. Structure beats similarity — a typed graph of who works on what is more useful to an AI than vector search over a Slack archive."
The software also includes protections against prompt injection attacks and systems designed to reduce hallucinated responses. According to the companies, the AI is designed to return “I don't know” with citations when confidence is low instead of generating unsupported answers.
As workplace communication becomes increasingly fragmented across chat platforms, companies are beginning to treat internal conversations as information that AI systems can organise, retrieve and build on. Beever Atlas reflects a broader push to turn everyday workplace communication into long-term organisational memory.