TL;DR
InTouchNow, a UK start-up that uses an AI voice agent to answer calls to GP surgeries, has raised £2.3m in seed funding. Ada Ventures led the round, with Exceptional Ventures and Kadmos Capital also investing. The company says its system is live in over 150 practices and describes the deal as the first venture capital investment in an AI voice agent working in NHS primary care.
What the money backs
The agent takes routine, repetitive calls so that reception staff can spend more time with patients who need a human. InTouchNow says it has cut call waiting times in the practices using it, and that it can handle callers in more than 80 languages and 200 regional accents. It has not published figures on how much waiting times have fallen.
Founder Daniel Park described the GP reception desk as “the front door to the entire NHS”. Ada Ventures principal Michael Tefula said Park had run call centres dealing with these calls for five years before starting the business, which he gave as a large part of the reason for backing him.
The accent test
The timing is awkward for the sector. On the same day, a Norfolk practice said it was ending its trial of EMMA, a competing AI receptionist from QuantumLoopAI, after patient complaints. EMMA had already drawn criticism over callers with Yorkshire accents and was withdrawn by a Doncaster surgery after a stroke survivor could not get through.
Those cases turned on exactly the capability InTouchNow is selling: understanding varied speech reliably enough that callers do not hang up. Its claim of 200 accents is untested in public, and the funding announcement contains no independent evaluation.
Looking forward
For practice managers, the lesson from EMMA is that a vendor’s language and accent claims need checking against the practice’s own patients, including people with speech impairments, before go-live, and that there must be a clear route to a person. With £2.3m to spend on growth, InTouchNow will face those questions at more surgeries. Evidence on call completion and patient satisfaction, published openly, would do more for adoption than another funding round.