Why the operating room is ripe for AI, according to Akara

Ready to ship AI that works? Start building at mongodb.com/build. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Anthony and this is the episode where we talk to an industry expert who helps us take a deep dive into a tech world trend. Now there's plenty of hype about AI and robotics in health care, but the problem that's actually costing hospitals money right now is operating room coordination. Two to four hours of OR time is lost every single day, not because of the surgeries themselves, but because of everything in between from manual scheduling and coordination chaos to guesswork about room turnover. Today, we're bringing you a conversation that TechCrunch AI editor, Russell Brandham, had with Connor McGinn, cofounder and CEO of Acara, the startup that recently landed a spot on time's best inventions of 2025 and is building what's essentially air traffic control for hospitals using thermal sensors and AI. Let's take a listen. It is my pleasure to be sitting here with Connor McGinn, the cofounder and CEO of Acara for a an addition of our equity podcast. Yeah. I guess, let's start for people who aren't familiar with the company. What does Aqara do? What's the what's the Aqara story? Hi, Ira. So, and thanks for having me. So Aqara is essentially an AI company. We help hospitals automate routine tasks that slow them down. So hospitals are kind of, you know, very complex workflows. A lot of real time in really important areas like operating rooms, gets lost because of inefficiency, and we help hospitals address this through AI and automation. Yeah. I saw one of the one of the descriptions was air traffic control for operating rooms, which I think captures the sort of high stakes and high complexity involved in something that. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's funny because, you know, you end up at the start of your journey spending a lot of time on the ground, and it's almost like an ethnography. And and what we've noticed is that, like, you know, there's so many different moving parts inside of an operating room and inside a hospital. And, you know, there's no better way of describing it. It's that that, you know, they're all moving and doing their own thing, and what we try to do is add structure to it. And a lot of the inefficiencies that arise today, they occur because you've got very manual workflows, and people are sort of doing their own thing. And as a result, oftentimes, people aren't where they're supposed to be when they're needed, and certain things, you know, inherently take time. So, you know, what we try to do is is is add as I order to the chaos, like a air traffic controller. Yeah. That's the struggle we all face, order order in the chaos. So you're what specifically do you mean by these inefficiencies? These sort of points that are slowing a hospital …