TL;DR

Newport-based startup Pontiro has raised £350,000 in seed funding from SFC Capital and Plug and Play Ventures. The company’s platform automates the anonymisation of medical images and clinical data, enabling NHS organisations to safely use AI for diagnosis and research without compromising patient privacy.

Solving a Real NHS Bottleneck

Medical images and clinical reports often contain hidden identifiers that put patient data at risk. Manual processing to remove this information is time-intensive and error-prone. Pontiro automatically detects and removes sensitive information while preserving the clinical detail needed for research and AI development.

Early NHS Wales pilots have shown anonymisation time reductions of up to 98%, with 99.9% accuracy in removing personally identifiable information. The platform has already processed over two million medical images.

Caroline Parker, Clinical Systems Manager at National Imaging Academy Wales, said: “The product has the power to change and open new safe avenues for research in the NHS, particularly in the radiology field.”

From Challenge to Company

Pontiro emerged from the Cyber Innovation Hub’s Venture Building Programme, a partnership between Cardiff University and the Alacrity Foundation. The company was shaped around a specific problem identified by NHS Wales and life sciences stakeholders: data sharing constraints were a major barrier to AI adoption in healthcare.

SFC Capital’s Adam Beveridge noted that Pontiro’s “move into AI evaluation and ROI measurement addresses a real and growing need” and that the firm is backing the team “as they scale this beyond Wales.”

Looking Forward

The funding will support product development, customer growth and commercial scaling. Pontiro plans to expand NHS partnerships and grow its customer base as demand for secure, compliant data sharing in healthcare increases. For UK health organisations considering AI adoption, the data privacy bottleneck that Pontiro addresses is one of the most commonly cited barriers.