At a time of life when many teenagers are more concerned with earning driver’s licenses and scoring six-packs, three Suwanee high schoolers are busy inventing a next-generation surgical robotic system.
From scratch. In their spare time.
Barghavan Mohankumar, Brandon Kim, and Brandon Whitehead—all 17-year-old juniors at North Gwinnett High School—believe their computer-aided design, or CAD, models and prototype could spark a medical breakthrough. Professionals beyond their teachers are starting to take notice.
Mohankumar, the team lead, started hanging out with Kim, the software specialist, and Whitehead, hardware aficionado, during their freshman year. The trio discussed big, entrepreneurial ideas. They brainstormed and sketched. They pooled allowance money. Finally, the teens settled on an idea: a medical robot that would help doctors with precision spinal surgery.
Then came laborious research. The trio compiled a 40-page document listing every design patent in the field of spinal surgery tools, surveyed the work of high-school robotics teams across Georgia, and read up on current research published by leading institutions, from Kennesaw State University to MIT.
A gap in the market became clear, Mohankumar says: No one was working to improve robotic surgical applications related specifically to the cervical spine—the part where the neck meets the back. (In short, minimally invasive pedicle screw placement, as the group’s focus is called, is used to stabilize and support the spine when it’s weakened, injured, or unstable, while reducing tissue damage and accelerating recovery.) This type of surgery requires submillimeter accuracy.
“We found the cervical spine [surgery] had high rates of error,” says Mohankumar. “The technology in this area is very underdeveloped. [That means] demand—high demand. And it would be helpful to automate the process.”
“Surgeons are very overworked,” adds Kim, “and we want to appeal to them. This would make their jobs way easier.”
In late 2024, the young entrepreneurs landed on a company name: Firmly Surgery. They plan to soon begin the process of obtaining provisional patents. (Why Firmly Surgery? “It rhymes,” Kim laughs.) Online fundraisers have helped to cover the cost of detailed CAD model training—partially powered by AI—and the physical hardware needed to put their 3D robot prototype together. An engineering teacher at school and a private physician have lent advice, but the product is thoroughly the brainchild of Firmly Surgery’s precocious engineers.
The students, who meet after school, are currently less concerned with profitability than with refining the prototype into a great system and finished, physical product. “Once we do that,” notes Mohankumar, “we’ll evaluate our options.” They are in talks with Georgia Tech to be featured at a large event as part of the Create-X entrepreneurial program.
Between hardware and software, these whiz kids have identified about 23 patentable concepts with their prototype that could be applied to procedures across the body, says Mohankumar. Per their calculations, there’s a market for about 25 million such devices in the U.S. alone, but that number could swell with hospital partnerships. Their goal, he says, is to keep the price down and boost accessibility for fixing cervical spine ailments.
“Everyone we have talked to has been impressed, but we have a long way to go,” says Mohankumar. “We believe wherever we end up, we will have contributed a lot to the industry.”
This article appears in our February 2026 issue.
