Vitestro

Vitestro is a Dutch medical robotics company headquartered at Europalaan 500 in Utrecht that has developed Aletta, an autonomous robotic phlebotomy device for diagnostic blood collection. The company was founded in 2017 by Toon Overbeeke, its chief executive, and Brian Joseph, vice president of product vision, who previously co-founded the open-source software company Zarafa. The founders started the company after personal experiences with difficult and delayed blood draws involving family members. Vitestro reports nearly 100 employees.

Aletta performs the complete blood draw without a person handling the needle: it applies the tourniquet, locates a suitable vein, inserts the needle, changes and inverts the collection tubes and applies the bandage. Vein identification combines near-infrared imaging with ultrasound, while Doppler ultrasound is used to confirm that the target vessel is a vein rather than an artery, and the needle is positioned and inserted with what the company describes as submillimetre precision. Vitestro proposes a supervised operating model in which one phlebotomist oversees up to three devices. Throughput, time per draw and tube capacity have not been published.

The device received CE marking under the EU Medical Device Regulation in August 2024 and was unveiled publicly in March 2025. In April 2026 the multicentre ADOPT trial was published in the peer-reviewed journal Clinical Chemistry, reporting a 94.5 percent first-stick success rate, 90 percent of patients rating pain as less than or similar to a manual draw, and mild adverse events in 0.6 percent of procedures with no moderate or serious events; the trial used an investigational version of the device. On 20 August 2026 Vitestro announced FDA De Novo authorization, which establishes a new US device classification for autonomous robotic phlebotomy. The company plans a US multicentre clinical trial and a phased rollout, with commercial deployment beginning in Europe.

European clinical partners in the ADOPT study were OLVG Lab in Amsterdam, St. Antonius hospital in Utrecht, Result Laboratorium in Dordrecht and Amsterdam UMC; the company also names Deventer Ziekenhuis, and Odense University Hospital in Denmark ordered three devices as its first international deployment. US clinical research collaborators include Baylor Scott & White Research Institute, Mayo Clinic Rochester and Northwestern Medicine.

In March 2026 Vitestro closed an oversubscribed Series B of 70 million US dollars. New strategic investors were Labcorp Venture Fund, Mayo Clinic and Sutter Health; new financial investors were InterVest, MGFO, PGGM, Puma Venture Capital and ROM Utrecht; existing investors Invest-NL, the EIC Fund, Fred Moll, NYBC Ventures and Sonder Capital also took part. The proceeds are earmarked for a next-generation Aletta, the US regulatory pathway, manufacturing scale-up and commercial infrastructure.