The latest funding highlights, including AI gene-control platform, women’s health, ECG diagnostics, chronic disease management, stem cell transplant, back pain, outpatient management, and a transatlantic medtech fund close.
Laverock Therapeutics awarded £2.2 million to expand
Stevenage-based biotechnology company Laverock Therapeutics has been awarded two new innovation grants of more than £2.2 million to accelerate the development of its programmable gene-control platform.
The non-dilutive capital injections expand upon Laverock’s previous balance sheet, which includes £1.8 million in historical public funding secured through UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the Biomedical Catalyst, and SMART business awards.
The fresh capital will be deployed across two core technical tracks. The first project will focus on scaling the company’s platform within an immuno-oncology T-cell context. By combining patient-derived solid tumour datasets with foundational intracellular signalling data, the company will use machine learning models to map and prototype optimal product configurations tailored to specific tumour microenvironments.
The second grant will finance a specialised consortium effort to transition Laverock’s programmable macrophage and myeloid cell therapies beyond oncology and into chronic, non-malignant disease indications.
The company was spun out of Tropic Biosciences to apply these computational and molecular engineering breakthroughs to human health. “Success in these two highly competitive grant competitions provides further validation of our approach and will enable us to expand our efforts across platform and product development,” said Laverock Therapeutics chief executive David Venables. “As we push towards the clinic for our lead programme, this additional funding will help unlock the true breadth of what our technology can achieve.”
University of Liverpool secures £1.8 million for Women’s Health Innovation Studio
The University of Liverpool has secured £1.8 million in specialised funding to establish the Women’s Health Innovation (WIN) Studio and launch a multi-centre clinical evaluation of a life-saving medical device designed to manage postpartum haemorrhage.
The initiative is predominantly backed by a £1.5 million programmatic grant from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), with the remaining balance co-funded by institutional capital from the university.
Operating out of the University of Liverpool in direct clinical partnership with the NHS University Hospitals Liverpool Group, the WIN Studio has been established to dismantle historical gender inequities in global medical technology development. The studio’s commercial and clinical pipeline targets conditions unique to female biology such as endometriosis, menopause and severe pregnancy complications, alongside broader therapeutic areas that disproportionately or distinctly manifest in female patient populations.
Structurally, the WIN Studio operates as a dedicated pre-accelerator platform providing localised innovators with clinical validation pathways, medical device regulatory guidance and corporate commercialisation support.
The immediate flagship project under the studio’s umbrella is the PPH Butterfly, a medical device engineered to control postpartum haemorrhage (PPH). It is a simple, low-cost mechanical device designed to achieve rapid uterine hemostasis with minimal operator training, making it highly deployable within the low-resource clinical settings that experience the highest statistical burden of maternal mortality.
The NIHR grant, which follows an earlier £1.1 million seed-stage development award, will fund a randomised multi-centre clinical trial across the UK alongside an international feasibility and implementation study.
Beyond the PPH Butterfly, the WIN Studio is actively managing clinical testing for six additional maternal and gynaecological innovations, building upon previous commercialisation successes such as the LifeStart Trolley, a neonatal resuscitation unit now used across 70 UK maternity departments and exported to 36 countries.
“Women’s health has often been marginalised within healthcare systems and innovation markets, resulting in treatments, devices and care models that fail to adequately account for women’s specific needs,” said WIN Studio co-lead Teesta Dey. “The funding from NIHR… is precisely the kind of innovation the WIN Studio exists to foster: clinically urgent, women-centred, and with the potential to save lives at scale.”
Cardiovolt.ai lands £1.4 million pre-seed funding
London-based medical technology company Cardiovolt.ai has raised £1.4 million in a pre-seed round to commercialise its breakthrough electrocardiogram (ECG) artificial intelligence software.
The funding round was led by Twin Path Ventures, with a diverse capital stack that includes equity from Imperial College London’s DT Prime fund, alongside non-dilutive grant financing from Innovate UK and prize capital from Imperial Enterprise.
The Imperial College London spin-out will deploy the fresh capital to navigate and secure primary regulatory approvals across the UK, EU and US markets. Additionally, the financing will fund the operational integration of its software platform with early-adopter healthcare systems and partner hospital trusts ahead of a broader commercial deployment into mainstream cardiology practices.
Cardiovolt.ai applies deep learning architecture to unlock hidden digital biomarkers embedded directly within routine, ten-second ECG traces. Trained on international datasets encompassing historical ECG records across Brazil and the US, the platform’s models identify electrical anomalies invisible to human clinicians. In multi-centre validation studies, the AI achieved an 83% to 93% accuracy rate in diagnosing hidden structural heart failure and valvular disease. Furthermore, by cross-referencing ECG variations with deep genetic, proteomic, and imaging data from the UK Biobank, the company’s models successfully flagged non-cardiovascular metabolic conditions, such as diabetes and chronic kidney disease, with an accuracy profile of 70% to 80% from the same single, ten-second test.
The underlying technology was developed at Imperial’s National Heart and Lung Institute (NHLI) within Fu Siong Ng’s research group, backed by long-term funding from the British Heart Foundation.
“We looked at the ECGs to see if we could do things that are superhuman,” said Cardiovolt.ai chief scientific officer Arunashis Sau. “Not things that clinicians can already do, but things that no cardiologist, no matter how expert, can do.”
Gnosis Health raises £1.1 million seed funding
Newcastle upon Tyne-based digital health startup Gnosis Health has closed a £1.1 million seed financing round to accelerate the commercial development and deployment of its AI-powered chronic disease management platform.
The funds are made up of a £250,000 equity injection from Northstar Ventures – deployed via the newly established £22.5 million North East Spinout Inspire Fund – and a £320,000 tranche from SFC Capital, supplemented by a £550,000 Innovate UK investor partnership grant.
The funding will be used to expand Gnosis Health’s engineering team, finalise ongoing clinical pilots across North East NHS trusts, and prepare its core platform for a wider commercial rollout.
Due to severe outpatient bottlenecks, a typical Parkinson’s patient currently interacts with a specialist clinician for only 30 minutes a year. Because symptoms vary dynamically throughout the day, traditional retrospective questionnaires and infrequent physical consultations routinely fail to capture critical clinical declines, leading to fragmented, reactive care.
Spun out of collaborative academic research between Newcastle University and the University of Plymouth, Gnosis Health bridges this surveillance gap through its virtual healthcare assistant, MAXine. Built on AI models rather than consumer-grade wellness algorithms, the platform integrates continuous streaming data from commercial wearables with patient-reported outcomes and behavioural pattern analysis. To protect sensitive clinical data and bypass data privacy hurdles, the company uses a federated learning architecture, training its machine learning models locally on edge devices without centralising data pools.
In early pilot evaluations, the platform demonstrated deep patient compliance and a projected 25% reduction in overall care delivery costs by actively preventing avoidable acute hospitalisations.
IMU Biosciences raises $53 million Series A to scale immune profiling data asset
London-based biotechnology company IMU Biosciences has closed an oversubscribed Series A financing round, bringing the total raised in the round to over $53 million (£40 million).
The capitalisation was co-led by IQ Capital and Molten Ventures, with additional backing from Meltwind and the UK government’s economic development bank, the British Business Bank.
The round brings IMU’s total funding raised to date to $60 million.
The company plans to deploy the proceeds to fund expansion, scale its core clinical platform architecture, and advance its proprietary clinical pipelines. Specifically, the financing will back IMU’s active stem cell transplant and solid organ transplant clinical programmes, alongside its contribution to MANIFEST, a UK research consortium investigating patient response profiles to cancer immunotherapies.
Clinical medicine’s understanding of the human immune system remains fundamentally limited by diagnostic tools that are historically low-resolution, fragmented and highly mechanistic. IMU addresses this diagnostic blind spot by establishing a universal standard for deep immune profiling. The company has assembled the world’s largest dedicated immune dataset, mapping samples from more than 25,000 individuals alongside population-wide clinical data.
By combining high-fidelity multi-omic analysis with proprietary machine learning analytics, IMU’s platform requires only a simple patient blood sample to isolate and measure more than 100 million distinct immune data points. This high-resolution approach allows clinicians to uncover novel immune mechanisms, monitor precise disease progression and predict treatment suitability and efficacy for individual patients before therapies are administered – representing a major step forward for stratified, precision medicine.
“Despite the immune system’s profound importance in all aspects of our health, the system as a whole remains poorly understood – obscured by tools that are fragmented, mechanistic and low-resolution,” said IMU Biosciences chief executive John Baker. “With the largest immune system dataset globally and proprietary technology, IMU is uniquely positioned to fuel discoveries, devise treatments and empower clinicians; improving outcomes for patients across the full spectrum of human health and disease.”
Flok Health raises $12.5 million Series A to scale autonomous AI physiotherapy clinic
London-based digital healthcare company Flok Health has raised $12.5 million in an oversubscribed Series A financing round led by AlbionVC. This includes follow-on commitments from existing venture backers Eka VC and Form Ventures, alongside primary participation from new institutional investors Mercia Ventures.
Funds raised will be used to accelerate the nationwide expansion of Flok Health’s existing lower back pain service across the NHS, while simultaneously funding the clinical training and rollout of new, high-volume therapeutic pathways. Specifically, the company is preparing to launch autonomous digital clinics for hip and knee pain, alongside specialised women’s pelvic health services, later this year. The funding will also support the company’s regulatory compliance and operational infrastructure as it prepares to enter select international markets.
Because legacy clinical models for musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions rely entirely on asynchronous, one-to-one human appointments, overstretched physiotherapy departments have faced severe structural supply-demand deficits.
Flok Health bypasses this bottleneck by operating as Europe’s first fully autonomous AI-operated clinic. Using computer vision and generative video-manipulation algorithms, the mobile platform dynamically renders real-time, interactive video footage of a human physiotherapist that adapts to a patient’s verbal responses and physical movements. This allows the system to simulate a live clinical consultation on demand, with zero waitlist.
Flok Health is the first digital MSK service to be approved as a registered healthcare provider by the Care Quality Commission, and the first AI platform in Europe to secure Class IIa medical device certification for the autonomous delivery of full care pathways. During multi-site NHS rollouts covering over 2.4 million eligible patients across 11 regional trusts, the platform saved an average of 856 hours of clinical time per month per trust, allowing human specialists to focus exclusively on highly complex, non-routine cases requiring hands-on, face-to-face manipulation.
The company was co-founded by former medic and athlete Finn Stevenson alongside technologist Ric da Silva to industrialise automated clinical workflows. “The most fundamental problem in healthcare today is supply-demand mismatch,” said Flok Health co-founder and Stevenson. “Billions of people around the world suffer unnecessarily from treatable conditions, and it’s just never going to be possible for traditional clinicians to solve this one patient at a time. AI is a generational opportunity to close that supply-demand gap and ensure that anyone, anywhere, can get the best possible care whenever they need it.”
Semble signs £30 million Series C to scale European care orchestration platform
London-based healthcare technology company Semble has closed a £30 million Series C financing round led by European growth investor Revaia.
The oversubscribed round drew primary participation from a second new institutional investor, Partech, alongside continued follow-on backing from existing venture shareholders Mercia Ventures and Octopus Ventures.
Funds will be used to fund Semble’s commercial expansion into enterprise-level healthcare groups and hospital networks across the UK and Continental Europe. Additionally, the capital will be used to deepen the platform’s embedded artificial intelligence features – positioning it as an intelligent orchestration layer – and to accelerate market penetration in France, where the company’s open infrastructure achieved regulatory compliance and market entry last year.
A rapid shift toward self-pay care models and private medical insurance has collided with rising consumer expectations, yet medical operations remain heavily bottlenecked by fragmented legacy technology. Traditional clinics frequently rely on disconnected point solutions for scheduling, clinical charting, laboratory diagnostics and billing, which forces clinical teams to manage repetitive manual data entry and results in a disjointed patient experience.
Semble resolves this fragmentation by providing an open, interoperable vertical operating system tailored specifically for modern outpatient ecosystems. Designed to support external integrations, Semble acts as a central “system of action” that links and coordinates every stage of the clinical workflow. The platform connects with more than 1,200 external enterprise tools spanning complex diagnostics, laboratory networks, digital billing systems and client relationship management software.
By unifying these disparate systems into a single cloud-based dashboard, the platform automates routine administrative workflows, eliminates data silos and allows clinicians to orchestrate care journeys holistically. The technology has been adopted by more than 1,700 healthcare businesses and 16,000 active medical professionals across 80 clinical specialities. Its enterprise customer base includes prominent healthcare brands such as Nuffield Health, Welbeck, Midland Health and the London Doctors Clinic.
The company was co-founded by chief executive officer Christoph Lippuner to replace legacy medical record systems with connected, interoperable clinical networks. “For years, the industry has tried to address complex systemic issues through disconnected point solutions, but fragmented technology often adds operational complexity for healthcare providers and creates an interrupted experience for patients,” he said. “What healthcare organisations need is intelligent orchestration across the entire care journey. The practices and groups that win over the next decade will be the ones that deliver the best patient experience end-to-end.”
THENA Capital marks final close of £45 million medtech fund
London-based specialist venture capital firm THENA Capital has announced the final close of its inaugural Fund I at £45 million.
The fund is anchored by the British Business Bank’s Enterprise Capital Funds (ECF) programme and is the first time an all-female general partner-led investment team has received cornerstone backing from the state development bank’s flagship equity initiative.
Fund I, which reached an initial close of £27 million in March last year, secured its remaining balance from a syndicate of institutional investors, global healthcare leaders, family offices and prominent cross-border executives. More than half of the fund’s limited partner (LP) base is female too, featuring prominent figures such as Martha Lane Fox and BlackRock Switzerland chair Mirjam Staub-Bisang, alongside senior executives from multinational pharmaceutical corporations including GSK, Novartis, and AstraZeneca.
Over its core investment period, THENA Capital’s Fund I will target seed-stage digital health platforms and fast-track medical device developers, deploying individual ticket sizes ranging from £500,000 to £1 million into approximately 25 companies.
The fund applies a strict, return-driven gender-smart investment framework, intentionally backing diverse leadership teams and prioritising medical technologies that account for sex-based biological differences in product development and clinical trial design to optimise commercial and patient outcomes. Geographically, the investment thesis focuses on identifying systematically undervalued UK medical innovations that possess a clear regulatory and operational pathway to achieve rapid commercial scale within the US healthcare market.
Before entering the market, the firm’s founding team spent four years establishing the Future of HealthTech Hub – an industry ecosystem comprising more than 400 clinicians, payers, and pharmaceutical operators – alongside a transatlantic network of 50 specialised industry fellows to drive proprietary deal origination and rigorous technical due diligence.
During its initial 12 months of active deployment, the fund has already injected capital into five high-growth UK medtech innovators spanning patient support, care delivery, and medical hardware. These inaugural portfolio investments include Plexāā, which recently launched its breast cancer recovery device in the US market and established a development collaboration with the Mayo Clinic; Salient Bio, which secured a UK CE-marked IVD status from the MHRA for its inflammatory bowel disease diagnostic test; and Heim Health, which was selected for the prestigious 2026 NHS Innovation Accelerator cohort. The remaining initial investments include digital health platform Sanome and antimicrobial tech provider Zonova.
The firm was co-founded by managing partner Esther Reynal de St Michel Richardot and general partner Tatum Getty. “The people who engaged with us early did so because they understood what we were building, not because we told them to,” said Getty. “Fund I is the foundation. Fund II is where the franchise becomes visible,” she added.
