Imperial College London startup raises €1M to predict hospital infections with AI
What's the deal? NEX Health Intelligence, a startup spun out of Imperial College London, has raised €1M (£900,000) in pre-seed funding to develop its AI platform for predicting the appearance and spread of highly resistant infections inside hospitals. Brighteye VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → led the round.
Founded in 2022 by Ashleigh Myall during his PhD, the company builds contact networks from routinely collected hospital bed records. The AI identifies where transmissible infections will spread days in advance, letting hospitals isolate at-risk patients before outbreaks take hold.
Why now? According to the World Health Organization, one in ten hospital patients acquire an infection during their stay — driving extended hospitalisations, avoidable deaths, and billions in annual healthcare costs. Antimicrobial resistance is making the problem worse.
Myall began the work after volunteering in hospitals during the Covid-19 pandemic. "I realised the real challenge wasn't just the number of admissions, it was how quickly infections spread between vulnerable patients already inside hospitals," he said.
What could go wrong? Hospital IT systems are notoriously fragmented, and integrating a new AI tool into clinical workflows is never straightforward. Adoption depends on whether frontline teams trust the predictions enough to act on them — and whether cash-strapped health systems will pay for a product built on pre-seed funding.
The signal: Brighteye Ventures, an investment fund that typically backs education and workforce technology, leading a healthcare infection-prevention round suggests investor conviction that AI-driven operational tools in hospitals are becoming a viable category — not just a research ambition. NEX's Imperial College London pedigree and focus on routinely collected hospital data, rather than novel hardware, could lower adoption barriers in cash-strapped health systems where antimicrobial resistance is fast climbing the policy agenda.
Read more: imperial.ac.uk
