Dec 17, 2021

UKHotViews Health and location tech scale-up Navenio has secured a $12.6m (£9.5m) investment in a funding round led by Oxford Science Enterprises with additional support coming from existing investors, including QBN Capital, Big Pi Ventures, Future Planet Capital, G.K Goh, Hostplus, Oxford Investment Consultants, IP Group, and the University of Oxford. The company, which spun out of Oxford University in 2015, provides infrastructure-free indoor location solutions including AI-powered motion tracking. The technology utilises existing smartphone devices to localise people within a broad range of contexts and markets, including healthcare. It has no reliance on traditional location systems such as GPS, Beacons or RFID. The latest funding round follows a £9m Series A funding round announced in May last year (see Navenio raises £9m for hospital workforce AI platform ) with an additional $1.1m in funding being added to the pot later in the year (see Navenio raises $1.1m for its “indoor GPS” ). It also secured a £400,000 grant from the UK Government and Innovate UK to help mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on hospitals towards the end of 2020 (see Navenio secures £400,000 UKRI funding ). Earlier this year it won funding from NHSX as part of the Artificial Intelligence in Health and Care Award. The new investment will be used to accelerate the rollout of its technology, with the aim of helping more frontline teams maximise patient flow. We can expect intelligent workforce solutions to be in high demand as the NHS continues to battle against the impact of COVID-19 and the elective care backlog. For analysis of other recent funding activity in the health/medtech sector check out our recently published UK Health SITS: Market & Suppliers 2021-2024 report.