Manufacturing Innovators is a talk series hosted at the IfM bringing together science, technology, and manufacturing to explore how new ideas become real products, and why closer collaboration between these worlds really matters.

Each session will feature a manufacturing innovator sharing the story behind their work: why they started, what they built, and how they did it – along with the challenges they faced and the opportunities they discovered along the way.

In this session, we will be joined by Luke Hares, Co-founder, CMR Surgical

28 October 2026, 6-7pm, followed by informal drinks
Institute for Manufacturing, University of Cambridge

Register your place

About the talk:

CMR & Versius, taking a surgical robot from concept to maturity

Luke Hares, Co-founder, CMR Surgical

Luke Hares is Co-founder of CMR Surgical, the Cambridge company behind the Versius Plus surgical robot, and the system's original inventor.

As Technology Director and then CTO, he led engineering through CE and FDA approval and global scale-up, culminating in the launch of the improved Versius Plus system. Versius has now been used in over 50,000 procedures, and CMR has raised more than $1.3 billion.

In 2023, Versius won the King's Award for Enterprise in the innovation category, and a Versius arm and prototype went on display in the Science Museum's Engineers gallery.

A physicist by training, Luke spent 17 years in contract R&D in the UK and the US. There he worked on medical devices, surgical and catheter robotics, diagnostics and custom ASICs. In 2014 he co-founded CMR Surgical to make minimal access surgery available to all patients. He conceived Versius, a versatile, compact, modular system whose eight-joint collaborative arms bring wristed instruments and 3D vision to all laparoscopic surgery.