Ada Ventures has led a £2.3m seed round into InTouchNow, which runs artificial intelligence voice agents on GP practice phone lines. Exceptional Ventures and Kadmos Capital took part in what the firm describes as one of its largest seed cheques to date.
InTouchNow has raised £2.3m in seed funding to expand its artificial intelligence voice agents across NHS general practices.
Ada Ventures led the round, with participation from Exceptional Ventures and Kadmos Capital. Terms beyond the headline figure were not disclosed. The firm describes the cheque as among its largest at seed, and as the first venture capital investment into a primary care voice agent operating inside the NHS.
The product answers inbound patient calls around the clock, handling appointment booking, triage data collection and routine administration. It resolves between 50% and 70% of calls without a human, routing clinical and complex queries to practice staff.
More than 150 practices use the system. Independent analysis of NHS cloud-based telephony data across 18 practices covering 240,000 registered patients found the share of calls answered rose from 55.9% to 65.6% after deployment. Calls answered within two minutes rose from 50.7% to 67.0%, and the mean wait time fell 32%, from 181 seconds to 123. At one Surrey practice the queue was cleared entirely, returning 411 hours of reception time over four months.
Those numbers are the commercial case. More than four in ten patients still report difficulty reaching their practice by telephone, and millions of calls to GP surgeries go unanswered each month.
Founder Daniel Park spent five years running call centres handling the same traffic before building the company. "InTouchNow was built to handle the repetitive, time-consuming calls so reception teams can focus on the patients who really need a person," he said.
The system tells patients at the start of a call that they are speaking to a machine. They can request a human receptionist at any point, and a frustration-detection feature escalates calls automatically, a design choice aimed at keeping practices comfortable with deployment.
Michael Tefula, principal at Ada Ventures, said the founder's operating history was central to the decision. "Daniel spent five years running call centres that handle these calls, so he knows the problem first-hand. That's a big part of why we backed him to build an AI company around it."
The round is small by the standards of the UK's larger AI raises this year, but the buyer is unusual. Selling software into general practice means winning hundreds of individually contracted businesses rather than a single central procurement, which makes the 150-practice base the more meaningful number on the deal. The seed capital is effectively a bet that the measured telephony improvements will sell the product to the next several hundred practices.
Original source: BusinessCloud — https://businesscloud.co.uk/news/vcs-back-intouchnows-ai-voice-agents-for-nhs/
