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. Raised in a family of doctors in communist Bulgaria, he spent fifteen years building the operating room Black Box despite much skepticism.
Following His Mother into Medicine
He grew up in Bulgaria under communism, influenced by his mother and other relatives who were doctors. He earned his medical degree in 1996 at the Medical University of Plovdiv, did his internship and residency at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, Denmark, and finished a surgical fellowship at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 2006.
Measuring Surgical Performance
He began his research career in 1999, trying to measure surgical skill objectively, and has published more than 220 peer-reviewed articles on training, competence, and outcomes. He specializes in bariatric and minimally invasive surgery and is a clinical professor of surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Inventing the Operating Room Black Box
Despite skepticism and little support, he brought the first Black Box prototype into an operating room in 2014. "Improving surgical care requires access to high-quality data from one of the most secretive environments in modern society," he said of the operating room. Modeled on aviation's flight recorders, the system is sensors and software that capture video, audio, and device data so teams can learn from each case.
Renaming the Company Aimbient
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. The 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.