A robot that takes blood could be the best AI health story of 2026
One minute and 49 seconds, that was the median time a machine needed to read a patient’s arm, choose a vein, insert a needle, fill the tubes, and withdraw, across the Dutch clinical trial that carried it towards regulators. A phlebotomist working carefully takes roughly five minutes, by the company’s own reckoning. Nothing about the moment was cinematic, just a patient who rolled a sleeve back down and went home.
The machine is called Aletta, and it was built by Vitestro, a company founded in Utrecht in 2017 that has spent almost its entire life on a problem the rest of medicine considers long since solved. TNW first covered the company in 2024, when it raised €20 million and sounded, frankly, like a curiosity.
On 19 August 2026, the US Food and Drug Administration authorised Aletta through the De Novo pathway, making it the first standalone robotic device...
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