Intuitive Surgical sells a million-dollar robot. The robot is barely the business.

You may never have heard of Intuitive Surgical, but if you have had keyhole surgery, its machine might have done it. The company makes the da Vinci robot: a multi-armed system a surgeon drives from a console to operate through tiny incisions. About 10,000 of them sit in hospitals worldwide, and roughly $8.35 billion ran through the company in 2024.

Revenue splits into 2 flows: Recurring 84 % (the focal flow), Systems 15 %. $8.35B in 2024. The robot is the razor; the snap-on instruments are the blades.

But it barely lives off selling robots. Only about 15% of that revenue is new systems. The other 84% is recurring, dominated by the single-use instruments a surgeon snaps onto the robot and burns through every operation, plus service. Each instrument even carries a built-in counter that retires it after a set number of uses: roughly $800 to $3,600 of parts per procedure, across about 2.68 million procedures a year. The robot gets it in the door. The disposable parts bill forever.

Sell the machine once. Sell what it eats every single day.