Gnosis Health closes £1.1m seed round backed by SFC Capital and Northstar Ventures
This article covers Gnosis Health, a healthtech startup spun out of Newcastle and Plymouth universities that has closed a seed funding round of £1.1m to develop MAXine, an AI-powered digital healthcare assistant for people with Parkinson’s disease. The funding will support NHS pilots, expand the engineering team and prepare MAXine for commercial launch, targeting continuous AI-driven monitoring to support people with Parkinson’s disease and NHS care teams.
Gnosis Health, a healthtech startup spun out of Newcastle and Plymouth universities, has closed a seed funding round of £1.1m to develop MAXine, an AI-powered digital healthcare assistant for people with Parkinson’s disease. The raise — which combines private investment and a matched Innovate UK investor partnership grant — will fund NHS pilot work, expand the engineering team and prepare the product for commercial launch.
Why it matters
Parkinson’s affects more than 153,000 people in the UK, yet typical access to clinician time is limited to around 30 minutes per year. Symptoms fluctuate daily, so episodic clinic visits and questionnaires can miss important changes in condition. MAXine aims to convert continuous, multimodal data into actionable insights for patients and care teams, addressing a well-documented gap in chronic disease monitoring and potentially improving care continuity across the NHS and beyond.
Inside the product
MAXine integrates data from commercial wearable devices, patient-reported outcomes and observable behavioural patterns to provide continuous, adaptive monitoring. The platform uses explainable AI models and a federated learning approach to maintain clinical specificity while allowing integration across device ecosystems. In pilot studies the company reports strong patient engagement and a potential 25% reduction in patient care costs, though broader real-world evaluation will be needed to validate those savings at scale.
Technical highlights:
- Works with any commercial wearable device, reducing barriers to adoption.
- Uses explainable AI to present clinically relevant outputs rather than opaque consumer metrics.
- Applies federated learning to train models without centralising sensitive patient data.
Who are the investors?
The round comprises £250,000 from Northstar Ventures via the North East Spinout Inspire Fund and £320,000 from SFC Capital, supported by a £550,000 Innovate UK investor partnership grant. That combination brings the company’s immediate funding to £1.1m and leverages previous competitive grant awards that underpin the team’s intellectual property.
The North East Spinout Inspire Fund is a £22.5m vehicle established to commercialise research from the region’s universities. It is backed by Durham, Newcastle, Northumbria, Sunderland and Teesside universities, and supported by the North East Mayor and the North East Mayoral Combined Authority through the North East Fund.
In the announcement, Dr Will Cousins, Investment Manager at Northstar Ventures, said:
Our universities are renowned for producing spinout companies that have global potential. Gnosis Health is tackling one of the most pressing challenges in chronic disease management. MAXine represents a step change in remote monitoring for Parkinson’s, combining clinical rigour with cutting edge AI to deliver meaningful value to patients and care teams alike. We’re proud to support a company with such clear potential to improve quality of life and reshape how chronic conditions are managed across the NHS and beyond.
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Founder perspective
Gnosis Health was founded by Professor Edward Meinert and Jerrell Schivers, combining expertise in software engineering, AI model development and clinical research. The company’s IP is supported by more than £2m in competitive grant funding and it counts Parkinson’s UK and Cure Parkinson’s among its supporters.
In the announcement, Professor Edward Meinert, Co-Founder and CEO at Gnosis Health, said:
Northstar Ventures played a pivotal role in the early development of Gnosis Health, providing both strategic advice and steadfast support at a stage when the company was still taking shape. That early partnership helped lay the foundations for what has now become a successful spinout and commercial launch. We would not be where we are today without Northstar’s belief in the vision from the outset.
The bigger picture
The global market opportunity for AI in healthcare is sizable, with forecasts often cited in the tens of billions of dollars by the end of the decade. Gnosis positions MAXine away from consumer-grade wellness apps by emphasising clinical validation, explainability and data privacy via federated learning. The company will need to demonstrate clinical and economic benefit at scale to win NHS procurement and to attract the international digital health funds that have already shown early interest.
This deal also reflects continued investor activity in UK healthtech, and the role regional university-backed funds can play in translating academic research into commercial ventures. As Gnosis moves from pilots to commercial release, its progress will be another marker for how UK healthtech startups with university roots can navigate regulation, procurement and clinical adoption across the NHS and into export markets.
They've invested in Gnosis Health
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| Investors | Investment Focus | Startup Investments | Round Size | Connect |
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Gnosis HealthH2CHPNunaBioMySalesCoachMoralbox+3 | ||||
 North East Spinout Inspire Fund( ) | Gnosis HealthH2CHP | |||
 SFC Capital( ) | Gnosis HealthPrema CognitionRivuloRegeno+51 | |||
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