The medical and healthcare categories have been leading robotic innovation for decades. Look no further than Intuitive Surgical, whose da Vinci robot has been performing surgery since it received FDA clearance in the early 2000s. These days, the SRI spinoff is currently valued at more than $60 billion. There's a lot of money to be made for established companies and still areas to be explored for young startups, both on and off the operating table. The venture community has been betting big on companies developing everything from new surgical robots, assistive robots for medical facilities, robotic medical aid devices or otherwise.

The world of healthcare has notoriously been described as "broken" -- plagued with high-friction workflows, sky-high costs and convoluted business models. Over the past several years, a long list of innovative startups and salivating venture investors have pinned their focus on repairing the healthcare industry, but its digital transformation still appears to be in the very early innings. After a record-setting 2018, however, digital health investing continued to reach meteoric heights in 2019. Mammoth pools of capital have flooded into various sub-verticals and business models, backing collections of new B2B and B2C companies focused on optimizing healthcare workflows, improving healthcare access and offering lower-cost distribution models. Over the past two years, digital health startups have raised well over $10 billion in funding across nearly 1,000 deals, according to data from Pitchbook and Crunchbase.

For this roundup, we talked to investors at eight leading firms that invest in a wide range of tech-related areas. Rather, the VCs told us that they're most interested in maturing, relatively safe investment areas. Here are their thoughts on the most exciting areas likely to get their dollars this year. The Human Side Of Algorithms "There's not a day or week that we don't receive pitches with an AI component," Barna says. "The thing we're interested in at First Round is, what's the flip side? What are the investment opportunities in human impact?…Not She points to personal-shopping service Stitch Fix, which uses AI to help stylists make more effective fashion suggestions for customers. Community-Based Businesses "It's pretty clear that people are dealing with the effects of digital overload," Barna says. "Too much screen time, and we're feeling disconnected because of it.

Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and other tech giants are all building their own "bots" that utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning. There are a bevy of other startups doing the same, developing conversational technology that can help humans with everyday tasks. But one small company out of Palo Alto, Calif. is building a virtual assistant that it believes is differentiated and special -- and some top investors seem to agree. Ozlo is a new Silicon Valley startup that last month reeled in 14 million investment round from Greylock and AME Cloud Ventures, a fund started by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang. It also just opened its first remote office in Seattle and plans to move into a permanent location next month, with room for up to 25 employees.