Company leader
Teodor Grantcharov
Founder and CEO
Aimbient
Teodor Grantcharov is a surgeon and the founder and chief executive of Aimbient, formerly Surgical Safety Technologies, which records video, audio, and device data in operating rooms and uses AI to measure how cases run. Trained in Bulgaria and Denmark, he invented the operating room Black Box so surgical teams could learn from each case the way aviation learns from flight recorders.
Training in Bulgaria, Denmark, and Philadelphia
He earned his medical degree in 1996 at the Medical University of Plovdiv, in Plovdiv, a city in southern Bulgaria. He did his internship and residency at Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen University's hospital in Denmark, and finished a surgical fellowship at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia in 2006.
Surgery and research
He is a board-certified surgeon specializing in bariatric (weight loss) and minimally invasive surgery, a clinical professor of surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine, and associate chief quality officer for innovation and safety at Stanford Health Care. He has published more than 220 peer-reviewed articles on surgical training, how to assess a surgeon's competence, and how surgical performance affects patient outcomes.
He received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for his contributions to clinical research and patient safety in Canada, and he is a fellow of the American College of Surgeons.
From Black Box to Aimbient
He developed the surgical Black Box to bring aviation-style safety management to operating rooms, and founded Surgical Safety Technologies to sell it. When Surgical Safety Technologies raised a $15 million Series A in 2023 it was based in Toronto and its technology was in 24 hospitals.
In July 2026 Surgical Safety Technologies renamed itself Aimbient and retired the Black Box name, which made the system sound opaque and relevant only when something went wrong. Its platform now also covers cath labs, endoscopy suites, labor and delivery, and trauma bays. "We built this technology because, as surgeons, we knew we couldn't improve what we couldn't objectively measure," he said in the announcement.