Flok Health, an AI-operated physiotherapy clinic startup, has raised £9m in an oversubscribed Series A led by Albion VC, with participation from existing backers Eka Ventures and Form Ventures, as well as new investor Mercia Ventures. The funding will be used to accelerate scaling of its existing back pain service across the United Kingdom and to expand the clinical and geographical scope of its AI clinic.
Founded in 2022 by former medic and athlete Finn Stevenson and technologist Ric da Silva, Flok Health has built a digital clinic that manipulates real footage of a human physiotherapist to simulate the experience of a live video call appointment, responding in real-time to what a patient is saying and doing. The platform is available to NHS patients via a mobile app and offers on-demand appointments for back pain with zero waitlist.
Flok is the first and only digital musculoskeletal service to be approved as a healthcare provider by the UK's Care Quality Commission, and the first AI system in Europe to gain Class IIa medical device certification for autonomous delivery of full care pathways. This means it can autonomously diagnostically triage, treat and discharge patients on behalf of the NHS without human intervention or oversight. The service is currently available to more than 2.4 million patients across eleven areas of the NHS.
During a recent NHS rollout in England, more than 80% of patients said the AI clinic was "as good or better than" traditional in-person physiotherapy. At the same NHS Trust, the AI pathway saved an average of 856 hours of clinical time per month, enabling clinicians to see more patients with complex cases requiring in-person treatment. Flok has also halved waiting lists and delivered significant time and resource savings during a series of successful NHS rollouts.
Low back pain is the leading cause of disability worldwide, and more than 30 million working days are lost to musculoskeletal conditions every year in the United Kingdom. Over 390,000 patients are currently on waiting lists for musculoskeletal care in England alone, as overstretched and understaffed clinical teams struggle to provide prompt and effective treatment.
The new funding will allow Flok Health to expand the scope of its AI-operated clinic to fully manage new high-volume clinical pathways. The AI technology is currently being trained in hip and knee pain, and women's pelvic health conditions, with all three new services due to launch in the United Kingdom this year. Once live, Flok's AI physiotherapist will be capable of fully managing conditions that affect more than 20 million people every year in the United Kingdom, representing some of the highest-demand services in the NHS.
The most fundamental problem in healthcare today is supply-demand mismatch. Billions of people around the world suffer unnecessarily from treatable conditions, and it's just never going to be possible for traditional clinicians to solve this one patient at a time. AI is a generational opportunity to close that supply-demand gap and ensure that anyone, anywhere, can get the best possible care whenever they need it. We're particularly proud to already be scaling our AI MSK clinic in the NHS, and seeing incredible results for patients and services. This new funding will allow us to more rapidly scale our existing back pain service, and to expand the scope of our AI-operated clinic to fully manage new high volume clinical pathways, and new international markets.
The supply-demand gap in healthcare is one of the defining challenges of our time. There are over 390,000 sitting on waiting lists in England for MSK conditions alone that are entirely treatable. What Finn, Ric and the team have done is demonstrate, with real patients in a real health system, that it's possible to deliver entire care pathways autonomously, at scale, without compromising on outcomes. They've navigated an extraordinarily complex regulatory environment, earned the trust of NHS partners, and built something that meets patients where they are, removing the practical barriers that often exclude the most vulnerable. That combination of clinical rigour, operational execution and patient impact is rare. MSK is where they've proven the model, but the opportunity ahead is far bigger. Having seen how this team operates, we have real confidence in their ability to deliver it.
