British-built AI company InTouchNow has secured £2.3 million in seed funding, led by Ada Ventures with participation from Exceptional Ventures and Kadmos Capital, to develop its AI voice agent technology for general practices and ease pressure on overstretched primary care NHS services.
This latest funding boost marks one of Ada Ventures’ largest seed cheques to date and the first venture capital investment into a primary care AI voice agent operating in the NHS. The round was also supported by Exceptional Ventures and Kadmos Capital. More than four in 10 patients still do not find it easy to get through to their practice by phone, and although improvements are being made, millions of calls to GP practices still end unanswered every month.
InTouchNow’s technology handles inbound patient calls 24/7, managing appointment booking, triage data collection and routine administrative tasks. The system typically resolves 50–70% of calls without human intervention, while routing clinical and more complex queries directly to practice staff.
Over 150 practices nationwide are already seeing the benefits. Independent analysis of NHS Cloud-Based Telephony data across 18 practices covering 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 rose from 50.7% to 67.0%, and mean wait time fell by 32%, from 181 to 123 seconds. At one Surrey practice, the queue was cleared entirely, returning 411 hours of reception team time over four months.
Patients are informed from the start of the call that they are speaking to an AI agent and they can ask to speak with a human receptionist at any point, either by requesting it directly or via a frustration-detection feature that automatically escalates the call. The approach is intended to balance automation, transparency and accessibility, while protecting patient trust and experience.
This multimillion-pound investment will fund continued investment in best-in-class AI and speech models, expand multilingual capability, deeper integrations with GP electronic patient record systems, ongoing investment in information governance and clinical safety and new distribution partnerships, bringing compliant, market-leading AI to more patients and GP practices.
Daniel Park, Founder of InTouchNow, said: “For most patients, the GP reception desk is the front door to the entire NHS and it’s under more strain than any other part of the system. InTouchNow was built to handle the repetitive, time-consuming calls so reception teams can focus on the patients who really need a person. Ada’s backing is a strong vote of confidence in British HealthTech and lets InTouchNow bring safe, ethical and genuinely useful AI to many more NHS practices across the UK.”
