LensX Lasers Inc., an Aliso Viejo company that makes laser devices for cataract surgery, has raised $22.36 million in a second round of funding, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
Versant Ventures, which has an office in Newport Beach, participated in the funding, along with existing investors InterWest Partners of Menlo Park and Dallas and SV Life Sciences, which has offices in San Francisco, Boston and London.
LensX is developing a laser that can operate inside the eye in order to make cataract removal safer and more effective. It raised an unspecified first round of funding in 2008.
The company’s founding team is the same group that founded IntraLase Corp., an Irvine-based, venture-backed company that was bought in 2007 by the then-Advanced Medical Optics Inc. in Santa Ana for $808 million.
Advanced Medical is now known as Abbott Medical Optics after its acquisition by Abbott Laboratories earlier this year.
Several notable OC eye device figures are officers and directors of LensX, the regulatory filing shows.
Directors include include William Link, a Newport Beach-based Versant managing director who’s played a major role in the county’s eye device industry over the years, and former IntraLase chief executive Robert Palmisano, who now runs Ev3 Inc., a medical device maker with some 330 workers in Irvine.
Ronald Kurtz, an IntraLase cofounder, serves as LensX’s president. IntraLase grew out of a research project that Kurtz developed at the University of Michigan.
