Healthtech NEX Health raises £870k led by Brighteye Ventures
This article covers NEX Health, a hospital infection intelligence healthtech startup, which has raised £870,000 in a pre-seed funding round led by Brighteye Ventures to expand deployments and complete UK regulatory and clinical safety work. The funding aims to support trials across NHS sites and international hospital deployments to give clinical teams earlier warnings of where infections may spread inside hospitals.
NEX Health Intelligence, a hospital infection intelligence healthtech startup, has raised £870,000 in a pre-seed funding round led by Brighteye Ventures to expand deployments and complete UK regulatory and clinical safety work. The funding comes as the company moves trials across NHS sites and into international hospital projects, aiming to give clinical teams earlier warning of where infections may spread inside hospitals.
Why it matters
Healthcare-associated infections remain a persistent problem: the World Health Organization estimates one in ten patients admitted to hospital acquire an infection during their stay. That contributes to avoidable deaths, operational disruption, longer stays and substantial costs for health systems.
Early, actionable warnings about likely transmission paths could reduce those harms by allowing infection prevention teams to target testing, isolation and cleaning ahead of outbreaks. For an NHS under constant operational pressure, tools that shorten the time between detection and intervention are of practical value rather than theoretical interest.
Inside the product
NEX Health’s platform combines mathematical modelling and artificial intelligence to analyse routinely collected hospital bed records and construct contact networks between patients and wards. According to the research behind the product, the system identifies variables that predict when and where transmissible infections are likely to spread days in advance, which hospitals can use to prioritise interventions.
The company says evaluation work is underway across two London NHS trusts, with a deployment in the north-west of England. International activity includes a deployment at a military hospital in South-East Asia and work with one of Malaysia’s largest public hospitals. The startup reports €1.4 million raised to date and says the new funding will support wider rollout, UK regulatory work and generation of clinical and economic evidence from live hospital sites.
Who are the investors?
The round was led by Brighteye Ventures. The announcement names Ben Wirz (Founding Partner) and Isabella Vahdati (Principal) at Brighteye Ventures in connection with the deal. Brighteye’s lead role and the follow-on funding are positioned to underwrite expanded clinical deployments and the regulatory and safety studies NEX needs to scale across UK and overseas hospital systems.
The company did not name other participating investors in the release. The funds build on prior capital that supported initial research translation and early clinical evaluations across multiple hospital sites, signalling investor interest in healthtech tools that produce operational evidence from live NHS settings.
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Founder perspective
In the announcement, Dr Ashleigh Myall, Co-founder & CEO at NEX Health, said:
I realised the real challenge wasn’t just the number of admissions, it was how quickly infections spread between vulnerable patients already inside hospitals. So, during my PhD at Imperial, I began building AI systems to predict where infections would spread next. That became the foundation for NEX.
In the announcement, Chang Ho Yoon, Co-founder at NEX Health, said:
Infections acquired in hospitals increasingly threaten the care that we want to provide our patients. If we can predict them, we have a chance to nip them in the bud.
The technical work behind the product began during Myall’s PhD at Imperial College London, supervised by Professor Mauricio Barahona (Department of Mathematics) and Professor Alison Holmes (Department of Infectious Disease). The founders point to clinical volunteering during the COVID-19 pandemic as a motivating experience that shaped the company’s focus.
The bigger picture
This pre-seed round sits in the early-stage healthtech funding band but reflects a trend: investors are increasingly interested in AI-driven decision support that can demonstrate clinical and economic impact in live hospital environments. For NEX Health, the immediate challenge is producing robust clinical evidence and completing regulatory and safety assessments in the UK — milestones that will determine whether trials translate into routine use.
As hospitals and health systems across Europe look to cut avoidable harm and manage capacity, tools that generate actionable, evidence-backed signals about transmission could attract further funding and procurement interest. The NHS trials and international deployments will be watched closely as indicators of whether predictive infection intelligence can move from pilot to practice.
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