Intuitive Surgical, Inc.

Intuitive Surgical was founded in 1995 in Sunnyvale, California, and over the next three decades it built a position that is hard to compare with anything else in medical robotics. The company went public in 2000, and in the same year the US FDA cleared its system for laparoscopic procedures. Three years later it merged with Computer Motion, its main rival of the time, and was left almost alone in the surgical robot market. The scale of that journey is clearest in revenue: 227 million dollars in 2005, 8.35 billion in 2024, and a forecast of 10.1 billion for 2025. It employs around 17,000 people and ranked 459th in the 2025 Fortune 500. The shares trade on NASDAQ under the symbol ISRG. The name da Vinci has become almost a synonym for robotic surgery. For a reader who knows mostly humanoid and warehouse robots, this is a useful reference point: here robotics is not a promise for the years ahead but a mature, very large business. We explain the basic terms in “Robotics Glossary: 65 Terms with Polish Equivalents”.

In our catalogue Intuitive is represented by a single model: da Vinci 5, the fifth generation of the platform, which debuted in March 2024 and succeeds the Xi and X systems. It is a minimally invasive surgery system in which the surgeon operates the arms from a console and watches a high-definition three-dimensional image. In its marketing materials the manufacturer also mentions force feedback, but there is no independent confirmation of that feature, so we treat it as a claim. One firm reference point is the older model: the da Vinci Si from 2009 cost, according to available sources, around 1.5 to 1.75 million dollars. That puts da Vinci outside the usual price comparisons we discuss in “How Much Does a Humanoid Robot Cost in 2026”. The robot belongs to the category “Specialist robots”, and its workplace is the operating theatre, that is hospitals. How to read the sparse technical sheets of such systems is explained in “How to Read a Robot Datasheet”. It is the only Intuitive product in the catalogue, so our view of the company rests on a single system.

Intuitive is the leader of the robotic surgery market, with the largest installed base and the longest clinical track record. Competitors exist and are growing: the British Versius from CMR Surgical (in the catalogue as Versius), Medtronic's American Hugo, and the Chinese Edge Medical. Even so, in Poland da Vinci keeps a dominant position in both the number of systems and the number of operations performed. Its advantage rests on clinical history, the largest number of trained surgeons and the widest range of approved indications. Prices in this segment are opaque for every manufacturer, so comparing equipment comes down to service availability, training and clinical data rather than a price list. Growing competition may lower deployment costs for hospitals in the coming years, which would widen access to robotic procedures beyond the leading centres. That is a forecast, not a fact. A general picture of the industry, from industrial arms to humanoids, is given in “Polish Robotics Companies”.

The first da Vinci system in Poland started work in December 2010 at a hospital in Wrocław. According to data from January 2026, around 83 da Vinci systems were operating in the country, and together with competing platforms there are more than a hundred soft-tissue surgical robots. At the start of 2024 operations were performed at 43 centres. The densest concentration is in Warsaw, and systems also work in Poznań, Katowice, Kraków, Gdańsk and many other regional capitals. The average cost of one operation is about 30,000 zloty, and most procedures in public hospitals are funded by the National Health Fund. We have not established who is the manufacturer's official representative in Poland today, so we do not state it. We describe this at greater length in “da Vinci Robots in Polish Hospitals”.

Intuitive Surgical is the reference point for all of medical robotics, but not a product you simply buy like the robots in our rankings: hospitals buy it, and the decision rests with clinicians and the payer. For the reader it is above all a lesson in scale. Its strongest side is maturity and the clinical base; the weakest is the lack of public prices and the unconfirmed specification of the fifth generation. What helps Polish patients most is knowing where the system operates, and that is collected in our overview of hospitals.