Hertfordshire based InTouchNow raises £2.3m led by Ada Ventures with Exceptional Ventures
This article covers InTouchNow, a Hertfordshire-based healthtech startup, which has raised £2.3m in a seed funding round to expand its AI voice agent that answers inbound calls for NHS GP practices. The funding aims to improve speech and AI models, extend multilingual capability and deepen integrations with GP record systems to support reception teams and help more patients get through to their practices.
InTouchNow, a Hertfordshire-based healthtech startup, has raised £2.3m in a seed funding round to expand its AI voice agent that answers inbound calls for NHS GP practices. The funding will be used to improve speech and AI models, extend multilingual capability and deepen integrations with GP record systems — a sign of growing investor appetite for practical AI tools aimed at relieving pressure on primary care access.
Why it matters
GP reception desks are a critical front door to the NHS, and many surgeries struggle to answer high call volumes. Independent analysis of NHS cloud telephony across 18 practices (240,000 registered patients) found that after deploying InTouchNow the share of calls answered rose from 55.9% to 65.6%, calls answered within two minutes increased from 50.7% to 67.0%, and mean wait time fell by 32% (from 181 to 123 seconds).
The system is already in use at more than 150 practices. At one Surrey practice the automated queue handling cleared the backlog and returned 411 hours of reception team time over four months. These are tangible operational gains in an area where more than four in 10 patients still report difficulty getting through to their practice and millions of GP calls go unanswered each month.
Inside the product
InTouchNow’s platform runs 24/7, handling appointment booking, routine administrative tasks and triage data collection. The company reports that typically 50–70% of calls are resolved without human intervention; clinical or complex queries are routed to practice staff. It supports more than 80 languages and over 200 regional accents.
Patients are told at the start of the call that they are speaking to an AI and can request a human receptionist at any point, either directly or via an automatic frustration-detection escalation. The product is registered with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency as a Class 1 medical device for primary care use. The company says the new funding will be used to invest in better AI and speech models, multilingual capability, information governance and clinical safety, and to build distribution partnerships and deeper integrations with electronic patient record systems.
The business began in 2019 as a human call centre and ran NHS reception services directly, including a COVID-19 vaccination contract for a GP federation, before developing the AI agent. It has received earlier support from Google for Startups and the Primary Care Accelerator.
Who are the investors?
The round is led by Ada Ventures, with participation from Exceptional Ventures and Kadmos Capital. Ada’s cheque is reported as one of its largest seed investments to date and marks a milestone investment in a primary care AI voice agent operating within the NHS.
In the announcement, Michael Tefula, Investor at Ada Ventures, said:
Everyone knows the morning phone rush to get through to their GP. 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. InTouchNow helps more patients get through to their GP, across dozens of languages and accents, while giving practice staff more time for patients. This is exactly the kind of practical, responsible AI we believe can strengthen access to care across the NHS.
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Founder perspective
Daniel Park founded InTouchNow in 2019 after years running call centres that handled GP reception traffic. The company transitioned from operating human reception services to building an AI agent informed by that operational experience. The product’s MHRA Class 1 registration and its deployment across hundreds of practices reflect a focus on clinical safety and information governance rather than purely experimental AI features.
The bigger picture
The deal sits at the intersection of two trends: pressure on primary care access and a more cautious, use-case-driven approach to AI in health. Tools that can reliably reduce routine workload while escalating complex or clinical issues to human staff address an immediate operational need for the NHS and create measurable time savings for practices.
Regulatory registration and demonstrable outcomes from telephony data make InTouchNow a reference case for other healthtech entrants seeking NHS traction. For UK healthtech investors, the round underscores appetite for businesses that combine product-market fit in the NHS with evidence of safety and effectiveness.
The funding will determine how quickly InTouchNow can scale beyond its current footprint and whether similar automated reception models spread across more GP networks in the UK and possibly into wider European primary care markets.
They've invested in InTouchNow
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