InTouchNow, a British-built AI voice company, has raised £2.3 million in seed funding led by Ada Ventures, with participation from Exceptional Ventures and Kadmos Capital. The Hertfordshire-based platform answers inbound patient calls for NHS general practices, and the round marks the first venture capital investment into a primary care AI voice agent operating in the NHS, as well as one of Ada Ventures' largest seed cheques to date.
The technology handles inbound patient calls 24/7, managing appointment booking, triage data collection and routine administrative tasks. Typically 50-70% of calls are resolved without human intervention, with clinical and more complex queries routed directly to practice staff. Support extends to more than 80 languages and over 200 regional accents. Patients are informed from the start of the call that they are speaking to an AI, and can ask for a human receptionist at any point, either by requesting it directly or through a frustration-detection feature that automatically escalates the call.
Over 150 practices nationwide are already using the system. 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. More than 4 in 10 patients still do not find it easy to get through to their practice by phone, and millions of calls to GP practices end unanswered every month.
Founded in 2019 as a human call centre, InTouchNow spent years running NHS reception services directly, including a COVID-19 vaccination contract for a GP federation, before developing its AI product. The product is the UK's first primary care AI voice agent registered with the MHRA as a Class 1 medical device, and the business is backed by Google for Startups and the Primary Care Accelerator.
The funding will support continued investment in best-in-class AI and speech models, expanded multilingual capability, deeper integrations with GP electronic patient record systems, ongoing investment in information governance and clinical safety, and new distribution partnerships.
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.
Everyone knows the morning phone rush to get through to their GP. Daniel spent five years running call centres that handle these calls, so he knows the problem first-hand. That's a big part of why we backed him to build an AI company around it. InTouchNow helps more patients get through to their GP, across dozens of languages and accents, while giving practice staff more time for patients. This is exactly the kind of practical, responsible AI we believe can strengthen access to care across the NHS.
