NEX Health Intelligence, a hospital infection intelligence startup, has raised £870,000 in a pre-seed round led by Brighteye Ventures. Founded at Imperial College London in 2022, NEX Health Intelligence develops software designed to predict where infections are likely to spread within hospitals before outbreaks occur.
The platform uses mathematical modelling and artificial intelligence to analyse routinely collected hospital bed records and build contact networks between patients and wards. According to the research behind the platform, the system identifies variables that predict when and where transmissible infections are likely to spread days in advance, allowing hospitals to isolate patients and intervene earlier.
According to the World Health Organization, one in ten patients admitted to hospital acquire a healthcare-associated infection during their stay. The press release states that this contributes to avoidable deaths, operational disruption, longer hospital stays and billions in annual healthcare costs.
Research underpinning the platform was developed during founder Dr Ashleigh Myall’s PhD at Imperial College London under the supervision of Professor Mauricio Barahona in the Department of Mathematics and Professor Alison Holmes in the Department of Infectious Disease. Dr Myall became interested in infection transmission after volunteering in hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic.
With €1.4 million raised to date, NEX Health Intelligence is already working across multiple hospital sites. Evaluation work is underway across two London NHS Trusts and a deployment in the north-west of England. Internationally, the platform has been deployed at a military hospital in Southeast Asia and is expanding through projects including one of Malaysia’s largest public hospitals.
Fresh funding will be used to scale deployment across United Kingdom and international hospitals, complete United Kingdom regulatory and clinical safety work, and generate clinical and economic evidence from live hospital sites.
AI has the potential to enable intelligent decision support in high-stakes environments, enabling healthcare teams to act faster and allocate resources smarter, fundamentally transforming how clinical teams work.
I realised the real challenge wasn’t just the number of admissions, it was how quickly infections spread between vulnerable patients already inside hospitals. So, during my PhD at Imperial, I began building AI systems to predict where infections would spread next. That became the foundation for NEX.
Infections acquired in hospitals increasingly threaten the care that we want to provide our patients. If we can predict them, we have a chance to nip them in the bud
