Eolas secures £8.9m to speed NHS access to local guidance via AI
This article covers Eolas Medical, a healthtech startup, which has raised £8.9m in a Series A growth funding round to expand its NHS-focused knowledge platform and accelerate rollout of AI-powered search across clinical teams. The funding aims to speed access to organisation-specific guidance at the point of care, supporting NHS clinical teams and trusts and improving consistency and decision-making in frontline services.
Eolas Medical has raised £8.9 million in a growth funding round (announced as a Series A) to expand its NHS-focused knowledge platform and accelerate rollout of AI-powered search across clinical teams. The funding aims to speed access to organisation-specific guidance at the point of care as pressures on frontline services increase.
Why it matters
NHS teams are juggling higher demand, staff rotation and short-term placements, which can slow decision-making and introduce variation in care. Eolas’s platform addresses a practical problem: clinicians spending time hunting for local protocols, policies and medicines information rather than treating patients. The startup is already embedded in more than 400 UK clinical sites and used by 85% of NHS acute trusts, suggesting the product is affecting routine workflows at scale.
Faster, more consistent access to approved guidance matters for patient safety and operational resilience, especially during seasonal peaks and as care models shift outside traditional hospital settings. The funding signals investor interest in tools that reduce friction at the point of care while keeping governance intact.
Inside the product
Eolas replaces fragmented intranets and document stores with a single searchable source of truth available via web and mobile apps. The company says clinicians can reach approved local guidance up to 10 times faster than with traditional methods. Its newer AI-powered search lets staff ask questions in plain language and receive results sourced from their organisation’s internal resources, designed to keep clinical oversight and governance central.
The platform’s user base across trusts also enables cross-organisation visibility where appropriate, helping teams compare practice in specialist centres or similar patient cohorts.
In the announcement, Dr Declan Kelly, founder and CEO at Eolas Medical, said:
Eolas has always been about solving a very practical problem: giving healthcare professionals fast, reliable access to the knowledge they need, when they need it. This is especially important in acute settings, where staff are under pressure to make decisions quickly and safely – particularly in the winter.
As AI develops, the next phase is about making that access even more usable, so staff can ask a question and get a clear, evidence-backed answer straight away, in plain language.
In the announcement, Elisha Zafar, Specialist Infection Pharmacist at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, said:
Working in infection at King’s means dealing with everything from the most routine to the most complex cases, across a hugely diverse patient population. We’re juggling massive workloads all the time, so being able to get to the right information quickly makes a real difference to how we work.
The search function is the biggest benefit. You type in a few letters, and it searches across all the guidelines using the keywords we’ve built in. It’s really easy to find what you need.
At the moment, we’re using it for all our infection guidelines. The trust has seen how well it’s worked for us, so now we’re embedding more guidelines and phasing out the old King’s guideline system. As most other trusts host their guidelines on Eolas, this allows us to see how practice is approached across different organisations, particularly in specialist centres or those with a similar patient cohort to our own.
Who are the investors?
The round was led by Acton Capital. Acton’s involvement reflects investor interest in tools that deliver immediate operational value to clinicians and NHS organisations.
In the announcement, Fritz Oidtmann, Managing Partner at Acton Capital, said:
Our conversations with clinicians showed remarkable enthusiasm for Eolas. Clinicians love the product. The benefit is immediate, the value is clear, and this conviction and their unique positioning in the market strongly shaped our excitement to partner with Eolas Medical.
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Founder perspective
Eolas frames the funding as a way to accelerate work on its bespoke AI knowledge tool while expanding in the UK and Ireland and preparing for international growth. The company positions its product as a governance-safe way to surface local policies, which may help trusts manage clinical variation as care moves beyond hospitals.
In the announcement, Dr Declan Kelly, founder and CEO at Eolas Medical, said:
We’re delighted that our investor partners recognise the importance of our bespoke AI knowledge tool, so we can build on what’s already working across the NHS and support organisations as pressure builds on services and care continues to move beyond traditional hospital settings.
The bigger picture
The deal sits within a broader trend of investment in healthtech tools focused on clinicians’ workflows rather than standalone consumer-facing apps. With a high proportion of doctors working in locum or training roles, and NHS England pushing neighbourhood care models, solutions that provide consistent, localised guidance across settings are becoming more important.
For policymakers and NHS leaders, the challenge will be balancing innovation with governance and integration into legacy IT estates. For investors, Eolas’s reach across trusts provides a strong signal that product-market fit has moved beyond pilot stage.
The funding also reflects ongoing demand among UK and European healthtech investors for companies that can demonstrably reduce time-to-decision at the point of care while supporting clinical safety and adherence.
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