InTouchNow raises £2.3M to put AI on the phones of NHS GP surgeries

InTouchNow, a UK company, has raised £2.3M in seed funding to do something almost every patient in the country has a grievance about: answer the phone at the GP surgery. Its AI voice agents handle inbound patient calls around the clock — booking appointments, collecting triage details, and dealing with routine admin — resolving somewhere between half and, it says, up to 80% of calls without a human, and routing anything clinical or complex to practice staff. The round was led by Ada Ventures, with Exceptional Ventures and Kadmos Capital, and is billed as the first venture investment into an AI voice agent operating in NHS primary care.

What makes this more than a demo is that it is already deployed. InTouchNow says it is live in more than 150 NHS surgeries, its speech system handles more than 80 languages and 200 regional accents, and it is registered with the MHRA as a Class 1 medical device and certified to the NHS’s clinical-safety and data standards — the unglamorous compliance groundwork that separates a health product from a chatbot. There are numbers behind it, too: an independent analysis across 18 practices covering 240,000 patients found that after InTouchNow was deployed, the share of calls answered rose from 55.9% to 65.6%, the share answered within two minutes rose from 50.7% to 67.0%, and the mean wait fell by nearly a third.

The founder’s background is the sort we have learned to take seriously. Daniel Park has run outsourced reception services for NHS GP practices since 2019, an offshoot of a family call-centre business more than three decades old — so InTouchNow is less a technologist’s guess at a problem than an operator automating a job he has done by hand for years. It sits at the practical, coalface end of the AI-agent wave, a world away from the frontier-model rounds we also cover: not a bet on where the technology is going, but a product doing a concrete, measurable job in a critical public service today.

The stakes are exactly what make it worth watching carefully. An AI answering NHS phones is triaging worried, sometimes vulnerable people, and the gap between “resolved the call” and “handled it safely” is where the whole thing is won or lost — which is presumably why the medical-device registration and clinical-safety certification are front and centre. Done well, freeing up reception staff and getting more calls answered is a real, humane improvement to a system under strain. Done carelessly, it is the kind of automation that erodes trust fast. The measured gains and the operator’s-eye founder put InTouchNow on the credible side of that line, for now.