Trinity spinout Akara raises $5.5M for privacy-first hospital AI
What's the deal? AkaraDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a robotics and AI company spun out of Trinity College Dublin, has raised $5.5 million in an early-stage venture round led by Locke HealthDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. The funding brings its total raised to $12.3 million.
Investors include VTC VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, the EIC Fund, CommonKind, and NovaVector Holdings, alongside existing backers ACT, Atlantic BridgeDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Enterprise Ireland.
What's the endgame? Akara combines wall-mounted sensors, robots, and AI tools to help hospitals cut administrative work and treat more patients. Its software acts like an air traffic controller, detecting key events and alerting staff when they are needed.
The company is targeting a specific drain on hospital capacity: as much as 40% of nursing time goes to routine admin, including data entry, scheduling, and phone calls.
Why privacy? Conventional camera-based monitoring raises privacy concerns and often needs costly infrastructure upgrades. Akara's sensors instead use thermal data to track activity without capturing identifiable images, while the AI runs on the device.
That keeps sensitive information local and cuts reliance on extra computing, making deployment simpler and cheaper to scale. The sensor can be installed in under an hour and was named one of Time magazine's Best Inventions of 2025.
What's the track record? Founded in 2019, Akara first built autonomous ultraviolet disinfection robots before reprioritising towards its AI sensor after strong interest in the US. Co-founder and chief technology officer Niamh Donnelly says deployments have shown up to a 17% increase in surgical volume.
"You have to prove the return on investment," Donnelly told Business Plus, describing baseline studies that measure gains after three weeks.
Chief executive officer Conor McGinn framed the approach around cost and privacy. "To achieve that sustainably and at scale, the technology has to protect privacy, be straightforward to deploy and affordable," he said.
The signal: Capital is flowing into hospital operations AI — Spain's Health ForceDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → raised €4.2 million in September, and US-based Vitalize secured $31 million in October. Akara's smaller round bets on a distinct angle: privacy-preserving monitoring. The test now is whether that approach converts into wider adoption and measurable operational gains, not funding alone.
Read more: tcd.ie
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
