Sup healthtechies.

A fun toilet seat ‘sittable’ device, the 3rd health secretary of the summer, Bryan Johnson has cloned himself and is keeping said clone in a petri dish (apparently). Also, the next SomX event waiting list goes up and it’s ok, there is good science and tech happening - Anthropic crowned the winners of a hackathon that had actual lab data behind it. Onwards.

News Bites 🥪

🚽 The smartest seat in the house: Casana has raised $46m to make "sittables" the next wearables, which is a sentence I can't believe I'm writing but here we are. The $199 “Smart Seat” tracks blood pressure, heart rate, O₂ sats and respiratory rate every time you sit down. No USB charging nonsense, no syncing, no problem. They’re explicitly targeting the over-65s who won’t wear a ring but will, absolutely, use a toilet. Now… we joke, because toilet humour is obviously hilarious, but this is built around doing absolutely nothing differently, which, given how bad humans are at adherence to anything, is ideal. If it only picks up what’s actionable and doesn’t cause additional stress about meaningless metrics, I think I’m a fan.

🏛️ Yvette Cooper becomes the NHS’s third boss in nine weeks: James Murray was in the job for two months. He replaced Wes Streeting, who resigned in May. Now Yvette Cooper’s in. I’ll defer to the NHS experts over the next few days to analyse what this is likely to mean (some opinions here), but Yvette said it’s an honour and wants to improve maternity services and “take forward plans for social care.” Kings Fund CEO gave a hint at the chaos about to hit her inbox, saying all this is urgent… steering through the largest NHS reorganisation in over a decade, implementing a sweep of plans and strategies already set in motion, life sciences sector plan, capital plan, cancer plan and upcoming workforce plan. Apparently they’ll all need Yvette Cooper’s immediate attention. Ah yes, the old ‘your incompetence is now my emergency.’ Welcome to having an NHS inbox.

🧬 Bryan Johnson’s cloned himself (ish): The longevity guru, freshly diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis, has now announced he's "cloned" himself. Alright, firstly, he hasn't, what he's actually done is have his blood cells reprogrammed into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Reassuringly, that isn’t a miniature Bryan gestating in a petri dish, but you can tell he’s fully leaning into dystopian language and outrage as a marketing tactic (which is working). And, by the way, he hasn’t got an illegal offshore lab doing anything too rogue (I don’t think). iPSCs are from Nobel-winning science and they’re a proper platform for testing drugs against your own biology and, eventually, maybe growing autologous tissue. BUT there's a canyon between what he’s doing and a transplantable organ, and so far there's no published data, no named lab, and no assay certificate to say he's cleared even the first hurdle.*

🧬 Claude Gets a Lab Coat: Anthropic has gone all in on the life sciences with Claude Science, an "AI workbench for scientists" that stitches together databases, notebooks and cluster jobs that researchers currently struggle-through by hand, with a reviewer agent checking the citations, summing as it goes. To show it off they ran a global hackathon with the Gladstone Institutes, and yes, ok, they’re weekend prototypes rather than being clinic-ready, but the winners show what AI capabilities can really do for us in the near future… e.g. NCypher hunts the non-coding DNA behind an almost-always-fatal childhood brain cancer, and Lazarus resurrects abandoned research code, in one case fixing a bug that had sat untouched for 15 years.

🤖 Bunkerhill Health raises $55M to let hospitals build their own AI agents: This is the global direction of travel and you can tell because all the big names are all in on it. Khosla-led Series B with Sequoia, Felicis, Optum Ventures and Y Combinator all staying in for Carebricks, a platform that lets health systems build and deploy their own clinical AI agents instead of buying one point-solution at a time. More than 20 agents are apparently already live at the University of Texas Medical Branch, including one that triaged a patient straight into an emergency triple bypass. Sounds great. Yes, outcome figures are company-supplied, from a single institution, and only some of the underlying algorithms are FDA-cleared, and yes, agentic AI making decisions and taking actions inside a hospital is a liability nightmare, but we can’t complain about a lack of workforce capacity, then complain about the solution just because it’s hard to figure out. This is why we all work here. Let’s figure this out.

Pigeon insider is the upgraded newsletter for those of you that want deep research and to steal fantastic ideas to sound incredibly smart in front of everyone else.

This week’s is an exploration into “can we autonomously deliver primary care?” Because according to one company in the US… “fully autonomous primary care is ready to be launched.” Expect a deep dive into LLM capabilities, knowledge graphs and a critical look at how healthtech companies claim their AI capabilities.

What to listen to 🔊

This week I had Professor Reza Razavi, Professor of Paediatric Cardiovascular Science at King's College London and CEO of Fraiya, an AI ultrasound software company onto the pod. His daughter had a near-fatal, undiagnosed heart condition as a newborn, which set him on a path to close the gap between the 50% of congenital heart defects currently missed and a detection rate approaching 97-98%, with AI.

Dr Cosima Gretton on the move from clinical medicine into product, running LAMP testing at NHS Test & Trace, and now building the infrastructure at Our Future Health to recontact 2.5 million participants. Her argument that product thinking and medical training pull in opposite directions is worth the 39 minutes alone.

Not strictly healthtech, but a very strong 17 minutes from TED Health on why the boring (sleep, a proper chat with a friend) does more for you than the flashy. Psychologist, Sonja Lyubomirsky, makes the case that our relationships aren't just nice to have, they're a genuine health input. Worth a listen if you spend your days building digital tools and occasionally forget that connection is the OG.

Events 📅

Get ready for this one. Save the date, 2nd September, 6pm. And yes, that’s exactly who you think it is👇

NXGN Season 2: The Future of Healthcare
🗓️ 30 July
🇬🇧 London.
Welcome to the Season 2 opener from NXGN, with a candid community evening on where healthcare is heading across the whole patient journey. Founders, clinicians and investors, minus the polished stage-speak.

Healthtech Talks: Will the NHS waste the AI moment?
🗓️ 2 September
🇬🇧 Hale House, London.
We’re back, and this time we’re bringing Rt Hon Sir Jeremy Hunt, Tara Donnelly, one of the NHS’s most respected digital leaders and former Chief Digital Officer at NHS England and Jack Needham, cofounder of Sanctuary Health, to get to the nub of where AI can tangibly make a difference in secondary care, where it will disappoint, and what it would really take for the health service to seize this moment.

HealthVC Summit 2026
🗓️ 2-3 September
🇨🇭 Zurich.
Two days connecting health investors and founders across Europe, China and Saudi Arabia. If you’re raising, this is where the cheque-writers gather.

Mental Health Innovation Showcase, Hale House
📅 15 September
📍 🇬🇧 Hale House, London.
MHIN's showcase returns to the Harley Street Health District for a full day (noon to 9pm, so pace yourself) of mental health innovation. Given how much of this space still runs on vibes rather than evidence, worth your time.

Life Sciences Week 2026
🗓️ 21-25 September
🇬🇧 Birmingham.
Britain’s national life sciences week, pulling biotech, medtech, pharma, academia and investors into one place. A proper cross-sector convening rather than the usual echo chamber.

LSI Europe ‘26 Emerging Medtech Summit
🗓️ 28 September-1 October
🇪🇸 Grand Hyatt Barcelona.
Europe’s leading emerging-medtech investor summit, matching founders with VCs, PE and strategics. Sunny, well-connected, and squarely aimed at getting deals done.

TechBio UK 2026
📅 13 October
📍 🇬🇧 Kings Place, London.
The BIA’s flagship TechBio conference, uniting biotech, pharma, tech and investment leaders.

Harley Street Health District Conference 2026
📅 20 October
📍 🇬🇧 1 Wimpole Street, London.
A full-day conference from the district becoming one of London’s biggest healthtech hubs.

Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup for everything else.

Jobs 💰

🐢 Commercial Director, TORTUS (London): TORTUS want someone to own go-to-market across the UK and EU and deliver 2-3x revenue growth. If you can sell clinical safety as hard as TORTUS talks about it, this is the one.

🔬 Digital Innovation Deputy Portfolio Lead, UCLH: UCLH's Digital Innovation Hub is after someone to get research out of the lab and into use across the trust. You'd own a portfolio of innovation projects, sit between the academics and the clinicians, and be the person deciding what gets prioritised, delivered and killed. Band 8b (£75k to £86k inclusive of HCAS), 21 months fixed term, London. Closes 26th July (today!)

🩺 Advanced Nurse Practitioner / Advanced Clinical Practitioner, Doccla (Hybrid, UK): Doccla runs virtual wards for a huge chunk of NHS ICBs. This is the clinical seat inside that machine, remote monitoring at genuine scale.

🇺🇸🗽 NXGN USA is growing

The US arm of the next-gen healthtech and biotech community is expanding its committee. If you’re an early-career founder, clinician or operator stateside and want a seat at the table to organise events and community (with a budget), message me and I’ll forward it onto Aakash and Athena.

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James’ editor notes

* Biology lesson incoming… Every cell in your body has the same DNA, but a skin cell "knows" it's a skin cell and a neuron "knows" it's a neuron. In 2006 Shinya Yamanaka worked out that you could wipe that identity by forcing 4 genes back on (Oct4, Sox2, Klf4 and c-Myc, now universally called the Yamanaka factors), which resets a mature cell to an embryonic-like blank slate that can, in principle, become any tissue in the body. That's what an induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC or iPS cell) is. Yamanaka got the Nobel for it in 2012 and iPSCs are now everywhere in drug testing and regenerative medicine. Worth noting 1 of the 4 factors, c-Myc, is a well-known oncogene, which is a big part of why turning reprogrammed cells into safe, functioning organs is tricky without them turning cancerous.

Healthtech Pigeon is produced by SomX - the media-led communications and creative agency for healthcare. We help healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector organisations tell sharper stories through strategy, PR, content, design, events and media production. Built by clinicians, scientists and creatives who know the space. Work with us.

Then they get into the exit itself. Why sell a profitable, bootstrapped, 100% owned business at all, why Pastest (a family business that has supported doctors through exams since 1972), and what the next two years look like for Tommy inside a bigger company. Tommy also gives a refreshingly candid, practical walkthrough of how anyone can estimate a private company's sale price using Companies House data, typical industry margins and EBITDA multiples. James returns the favour with the real numbers behind Healthtech Pigeon and where SomX is placing its bets.

Along the way: the doctor creator economy and the four levels of monetisation, why vertically integrated creators win, how AI now lets a two person team do the work of ten, the death of legacy media and the rise of niche distribution, the case for building in public (and why Tommy didn't), and why he is still practising medicine two and a half days a week through all of it.

Connect with Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommy-perkins-138864149

Learn more about Medics' Money: https://medicsmoney.co.uk

Medics' Money x Pastest: https://www.pastest.com/pages/medics-money

Apply to be a guest: www.thehealthtechpodcast.com

Subscribe to Healthtech Pigeon: www.healthtechpigeon.com

Get in touch with James: www.jamessomauroo.com

This podcast was brought to you by SomX - https://somx.health

Resources:

Medics' Money - https://medicsmoney.co.uk

Pastest acquires Medics' Money (BusinessCloud) - https://businesscloud.co.uk/news/edtech-pastest-acquires-financial-platform-medics-money/

Pastest - https://www.pastest.com

Companies House - https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk

GP Bullhound - https://www.gpbullhound.com

Hello healthtech friends. Another fun week in healthtech, plus I’m keen to get some info from you on the new NHS online for some analytical content, so I’m trying out the survey feature.

Enjoy. 🫡

News Bites 🥪

💰 Neko Health raises $700M for preventative healthcare: Healthtech’s really hotting up, honestly. Last week it was acquisitions, this week it’s the biggest ever raise from someone I’ve shaken the hand of and chatted to on the podcast. Hjalmar Nilsonne (and of course Daniel Ek of Spotify) have closed a $700M Series C for their preventative health outfit. If you don’t know what they do, it’s a <60 minute, £299 human-body-MOT with bloods and enough sensors to make you feel reassuringly surveilled. No full body MRI, they ‘only measure what’s actionable’ and are actively building bridges to the NHS to create and share data / insights. If you want a very deep dive on them and the prevention sector as a whole, I’ve written about preventative health and Neko specifically for Pigeon Insider (Part 1 - The Inverse Prevention Law and Part 2 - Can a private company drag the NHS toward prevention?). TLDR below*.

🚨 GPhC launches a fake-pharmacy crackdown as oral Wegovy lands: This is wild. The General Pharmaceutical Council’s kicked off a campaign urging anyone buying medicines online to check the pharmacy is actually registered, because in the last 12 months, criminals cloned 1/10 pharmacy websites to sell fake medicines. With oral semaglutide tablets arriving in UK pharmacies this month, chief exec Kathie Cashell’s warning is ‘a pill is far easier to counterfeit than an injection pen.’ As someone pretty clued up in healthtech, I didn’t realise any of this - 97% (!) of pharmacies surveyed already expect a spike in fake weight-loss products doing the rounds. The GPhC have a ten-point checklist, a register you can search in about thirty seconds, and a House of Commons roundtable behind the scenes trying to get platforms and enforcement rowing in the same direction.

💜 The Lowdown finds a home at Vira Health: More acquisition positivity. Alice Pelton’s nine-year-old contraception review platform (built after a dinner-table rant about the total absence of real data on what women actually experience on the pill) has been acquired by Vira Health who do healthcare support for employees. As the story goes, Alice rang Vira co-founder Andrea Berchowitz back in 2019 for advice, and now The Lowdown’s community, content and unfiltered-voices dataset fold into Vira’s proposition. As they say… ask for money and you’ll get advice, ask for advice and you might just get your women’s health platform acquired. Congrats to all.

🧬 Synnovis and SOPHiA GENETICS bring blood-test cancer diagnosis to the NHS: Under NHS England’s “blood test first” push, Synnovis is now running the MSK-ACCESS liquid biopsy test to detect actionable genomic mutations from a single blood draw. It’s already supporting roughly 400 lung and breast cancer patients a month, with the AI parsing circulating tumour DNA to flag treatment options up to two weeks faster than the old route. The plan is to scale to around 7,000 patients a year, close to 1/3 of all English lung and breast cancer tests. Remember… amongst all the ‘difficult to adopt’ stories in healthtech and software, biotech and devices continues to crack on and make impact.

⚖️ NICE decides healthtech deserves the same treatment as medicines: Expanding out of medicines, NICE is now doing its thing for devices, diagnostics and digital tools under the new National HealthTech Access Programme. That means a small set of high-impact technologies are going to get reimbursed and rolled out across the whole health service rather than living or dying by which trust you happen to live near. First through the door is a capsule sponge test for oesophageal cancer (delightfully named "pill on a string") and AI pathology tools for prostate and breast cancer. Let’s be honest, the fact we have postcode lottery is embarrassing so I’m all for anything that gets rid of it. Of course, a NICE yes has never guaranteed anyone buys anything, but let’s celebrate another positive step.

And finally…

😴 Your sleep tracker might be gaslighting you into a worse day: This is amazing. Researchers told participants they'd slept great or terrible (entirely made up), then ran them through cognitive tests. The ones that were told they'd slept badly performed worse. The ones that were told they'd slept brilliantly performed better. Slightly uncomfortable truth for the entire wearables industry… if people wake up feeling fine and glance at a bad sleep score, they’ll immediately feel awful and the world is hardly a better place. Slight caveat, it's a decade-old study that I only found this week from someone posting it on Instagram of all places, it’s small and cognition-specific, so ok let's not over-claim. But… as we’re under pressure to strap ever more sensors to ourselves and hand our mornings over to a number, the “nocebo” risk is very real and under-studied. I’d love to see a 2026 version of this experiment.

Pigeon insider is the upgraded newsletter for those of you that want deep research and to steal fantastic ideas to sound incredibly smart in front of everyone else.

This week’s is an exploration into “can we autonomously deliver primary care?” Because according to one company in the US… “fully autonomous primary care is ready to be launched.” Expect a deep dive into LLM capabilities, knowledge graphs and a critical look at how healthtech companies claim their AI capabilities.

Subscribe now

Survey Time 📝

We’re trying out some audience participation this week.

I want to do some content on NHS Online for you all and I’m keen on your thoughts.

Three questions
Select 1 answer for each
It’s anonymous

What to listen to 🔊

Jessica and I chatted to Dr Mustafa Ghafouri, the GP-turned-builder we mentioned in this newsletter a couple of weeks back who’s behind hospitalwaits.co.uk, the epic tool that lets patients see which hospitals actually have the shortest waits for their procedure. Fascinating chat. He also talks really openly about how he built it, so if you want the 101 on Claude Code, I recommend queueing it up.

Niall Boyce and Chloe Wilson put AI triage and ambient scribes under proper scrutiny, including the risk that a tidy-looking symptom gets quietly downgraded by an algorithm.

Amsterdam's Philippe Habets (EvidenceHunt) argues OpenEvidence's EU and UK exit was less about the AI Act and more about an ad-and-data business model European clinicians were never going to trust. Spicy.

Rock Health's Megan Zweig on where the money is actually flowing in 2026, and why "strongest quarter since the pandemic" hides some very lumpy deal concentration. A useful counterweight if your funding bites are looking a touch euphoric.

Events 📅

Startup Lab x Specialist Briefings: AI Innovation vs. Regulation
🗓️ 22 July
🇬🇧 Hale House, London.
A panel on whether UK regulation is actually helping digital health and AI, or quietly strangling it. The eternal question, and one worth arguing about in person.

NXGN Season 2: The Future of Healthcare
🗓️ 30 July
🇬🇧 London.
The Season 2 opener from NXGN: a candid community evening on where healthcare is heading across the whole patient journey. Founders, clinicians and investors, minus the polished stage-speak.

HealthVC Summit 2026
🗓️ 2-3 September
🇨🇭 Zurich.
Two days connecting health investors and founders across Europe, China and Saudi Arabia. If you’re raising, this is where the cheque-writers gather.

Life Sciences Week 2026
🗓️ 21-25 September
🇬🇧 Birmingham.
Britain’s national life sciences week, pulling biotech, medtech, pharma, academia and investors into one place. A proper cross-sector convening rather than the usual echo chamber.

LSI Europe ‘26 Emerging Medtech Summit
🗓️ 28 September-1 October
🇪🇸 Grand Hyatt Barcelona.
Europe’s leading emerging-medtech investor summit, matching founders with VCs, PE and strategics. Sunny, well-connected, and squarely aimed at getting deals done.

Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup for everything else.

Opportunity 🕵️‍♀️

AI Clinical Evaluation Workshop
📅 Thursday 13th August, 6:00–8:00pm (UK)
🇬🇧 Waterloo, London
Invite-only session for clinicians (apply at the link), chaired by Microsoft's Global CMO, who'll open with remarks on AI's shifting role in healthcare. You’ll independently put multiple AI tools through real-world clinical tasks using synthetic patient records, which feeds into a comparative study report earmarked for publication, with participants acknowledged, so it's a proper evaluation. If you're a clinician and curious how the tools actually stack up, very much worth applying.

Jobs 💰

🔎 Physician, Neko Health (New York): Spending $700M takes a village so no surprises that they’re hiring. Now in New York. The work is preventive medicine at volume, so reading structured scan results, catching things early, nudging members before symptoms turn up. Hard to think of a more talked-about clinic to practise in.

🏥 Clinical Lead, Concentric (Australia): Concentric’s UK digital consent platform (30,000+ clinicians, 40,000 patients a week) wants its first Australian clinical face. Someone who can win over sceptical hospital groups one demo at a time and provide feedback on what needs to change for Australian practice. Part-time is genuinely on the table if you want to keep one foot in clinic.

🔬 Senior Clinical Researcher & Data Scientist, Voy (UK): Voy wants a clinician who thinks like a data scientist, someone who can take messy real-world GLP-1, testosterone and menopause data and turn it into publication-grade evidence. If you've ever wanted your causal inference skills to actually move a pharma partnership rather than sit in a drawer, this is that job.

🇺🇸🗽 NXGN USA is growing

The US arm of the next-gen healthtech and biotech community is expanding its committee. If you’re an early-career founder, clinician or operator stateside and want a seat at the table to organise events and community (with a budget), message me and I’ll forward it onto Aakash and Athena.

📣 Want something in front of our 8,000+ readers?

You can break your news as the main story, feature a podcast, job or event... and we even have a few sponsorship packages to choose from...

Break your news

Feature a job, podcast, event

Sponsor Pigeon

We review everything editorially - if it is not right for our audience, we’ll let you know. Everything has to be valuable to this glorious community.

See you next week, Pigeon fans ✌🏼

James’ editor notes

* TLDR of the Pigeon Insider piece on the prevention space… I think progress in prevention is going to be made by those willing to tolerate the discomfort of several conflicting truths. Simultaneously, we have an obvious Inverse Prevention Law, no wide-spread, state-led prevention at scale, operational and technological private sector innovation attracting billions in funding, services like Neko that sit between an NHS Health Check and concierge medicine and two sides that can learn from and help each other if they collaborate in good faith. If you want to know more about Neko specifically, go for Part 2 of my deep dives.

Healthtech Pigeon is produced by SomX - the media-led communications and creative agency for healthcare. We help healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector organisations tell sharper stories through strategy, PR, content, design, events and media production. Built by clinicians, scientists and creatives who know the space. Work with us.

It’s funny what turns up in the media and what doesn’t.

Healthtech really isn’t great for this. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the only companies that existed were making consumer wearables. One of the best things about starting Healthtech Pigeon has been surfacing lesser known, lesser (let’s just say) ‘appreciated’ news. Here’s a corker…

In February, Mount Sinai ran the first independent safety test of ChatGPT Health. Among genuine emergencies (and remember, OpenAI fields questions from about 40 million people a day), it under-triaged 52% of cases. It looked at diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) and impending respiratory failure and suggested people wait a day or two before seeing anyone. Cool…

Then a month later, Curai Health (US-based virtual primary and urgent care company) published a serious, real-world study of its own system across 2,379 patient ‘encounters,’ and used it to argue that AI is now ready to run defined parts of a primary care visit without a doctor in the loop. Really?

If you want the horses mouth (abstract)…

Their case is that an engineered stack with hard-coded safety checks around the language model is now safe enough to go at a set of common physical conditions, and the FDA’s invited to rewrite its rules to allow it… Interesting.

Now, if you’ve read Pigeon for a while, I can hear you typing “hang on, you were perfectly happy with the likes of Limbic that have a similar stack for patient-facing mental health triage. Why bring this up?” Good question. Yes, I was, I still am. When it comes to patient-facing AI, I’ve learned that detail and nuance is absolutely everything, so allow me to explain…

When AI does one bounded job, i.e. sorting people into the conditions, and it’s built on structured instruments like the PHQ-9 and GAD-7, it augments a clinician’s assessment, and you earn Class IIa medical device status through a regulatory route that already exists. However, when you make a diagnostic call across open-ended primary care, arguing the doctor can step out of the loop… and ask the FDA to build it a new pathway and fresh liability law for when there’s no clinician left to hold responsible, it’s… well… kinda different.

In mental health triage there's usually a clinician downstream and time to correct a miss, and the AI runs inside a supervised pathway, not instead of one.

In physical medicine in primary and urgent care, you might not get a clinician downstream or the gift of time before a patient deteriorates. DKA might present initially as a stomach bug, an ectopic might look like a UTI for a few hours, and the window to catch these before a rapid decline can be very short.

I’m not actually arguing that humans are better than AI at catching that kind of thing or vice versa (although, I’m pretty sure if we were choosing a reality it would be AI+humans rather than either, alone), I’m saying that when a doctor gets it wrong, there's a history you can reconstruct, a duty of care, a regulator, and a coroner who can ask why those questions and not others. Take the clinician out, as is being suggested here, and, ok the error rate might not change, but everything built to account for the error’s gone. What you’re left with is very weird at best, and I’ll let you add a word to describe the situation that, god forbid, you’re bereaved.

So here we are. Tens of millions of people using LLMs to decide whether their symptoms are an emergency. Companies publishing papers arguing they’re ready to take the clinician out of the loop for defined categories of care, asking regulators to ‘please sort.’ And, I’m just wondering… who actually decided that the autonomous diagnosis road was the one anyone wanted us to travel down?

Well… I need to show you something…

Read more

Hi healthtech friends,

Big week for AI in both directions. A £10bn tech overhaul (AI triage and ambient scribes going properly national in the UK)….. but also the first complaints about doctors using AI badly have started to come through. Interesting times.

Also, NXGN USA are looking for committee members. If you think you’re a next generation healthtech leader and you’re based on the East coast, scroll on if you want to build the community with a budget 🇺🇸🗽

Don’t like reading? Prefer digesting Pigeon through the ears? Jessica and Anna from SomX on last week’s stories here 👇🏼

News Bites 🥪

🏛️ NHS accelerates AI rollout, with a new triage tool in the NHS App and ambient scribes going national: To save you reading the press release, the 3 points in this are… (1) £10bn funding over three years, (2) an AI triage tool inside the NHS App (200,000 patients this year, everyone by April 2028) and (3) a national push on scribes, starting in outpatients. The Sussex GP trial behind the triage tool cut phone queuing by 29%, which is fine, but does beg the question “are we optimising something (phone queueing) which shouldn’t even exist?” There’s a “£41bn total benefits over a decade” figure, which is said confidently, and with the expected level of irritating ambiguity to be completely justified whatever actually happens. I’m clearly going with a cynical vibe today, but does “£41bn total benefits” honestly mean anything to anyone? Just tell me if I can get an appointment and if my HCP can see their kids before they’re in bed.

⚖️ First complaints made over clinician use of AI, HSJ reveals: I mean… this was clearly just a matter of time. Absolutely nobody is surprised to hear that the GMC received 8 complaints against 8 individual doctors in 2025, plus 6 more against 5 doctors in the first half of 2026. What’s surprising is how low the numbers are to be honest. That’s not a slur on doctors (though, the thought that my med school mates are all now consultants is outrageous given the Facebook albums that they, and I, both know exist), it’s just a comment on how much (realistically) AI is used without generating complaints. The GMC’s line is that “doctors are responsible for their own decisions when using AI” and that’s clearly being tested in practice. Given the NHS just committed to scaling AI notetaking nationally (see above), this number’s likely to increase beyond a rounding error fairly quickly. Are you a clinician and unsure what to use on your patients? “Medical device or put it in the bin” is a pretty solid rule.

✅ NICE gives draft green light to two non-invasive endometriosis tests, rejects a third: A positive tech story for you. Endotest (a saliva-based microRNA test from French biotech Ziwig) and EndoSure (a gut-electrical-signal sensor pad test) have been recommended for a three-year NHS evidence-gathering period. A third contender, DotLab’s blood test DotEndo, didn’t make the cut, with NICE saying “they should’ve put Endo at the start of their name.” Joke. They actually said it “requires more research” first. Good to know things are reaching market given that average time to diagnosis for endometriosis is currently >9 years. And good to know things that need more evidence aren’t actually reaching market. Consultation on the draft guidance runs until 27th July.

🧠 Mindstep acquired by Onebright Group: Acquisition-fever is hitting the sector. Mindstep’s digital screening, triage and adaptive self-care tools are being folded into Onebright, the largest private outpatient mental health and neurodevelopmental provider across the UK and Denmark. I first met Hamzah (cofounder) a couple of years ago when he came on my podcast and you’ll be glad to know that this is another example of the good guys winning. We (SomX) also did a very cool project with Mindstep, filming Johnny Wilkinson talking about 6 mental health themes for their in-app content. Great causes all round. Congrats to Mindstep.

🩺 Wellpoint Health (Well.Me) acquires Cognitant Group and the Healthinote patient education platform: And another… Well.Me’s health screening kiosks (blood pressure, BMI, cardiovascular risk, the works) now sit alongside Cognitant’s patient education and adherence tools, built for NHS, pharma and life sciences. Screening, plus education, plus population health analytics, all under one roof. Founder, Dr Tim Ringrose (a familiar face from the NHS Innovation Accelerator alumni network) stays on to build out the AI-enabled health journeys roadmap. Not saying every company that works with SomX gets acquired, but you know… these two did. Anyway, arguably the worst entrepreneurial move of all time is only mentioning SomX once every 6 months in the biggest newsletter in UK healthtech, but here we go... SomX does comms for healthtech companies. We do it well, so buy things off us if you want. There. Box ticked until Christmas.

💊 3D-printed pills get a €12M vote of confidence: 3D printing? How very 2015 of you. Oddly satisfying to see it back in a post-LLM world. Anyway, Helsinki's CurifyLabs raised €12M Series A - they sell pharmacies a system that 3D-prints personalised medicines on-site. They have software that sets the exact dose and formulation, and a printer builds each tablet from GMP-made base materials and it’s about 9x faster than by hand. Personalised paediatric and geriatric drug dosing is definitely in the ‘unglamorous’ bucket of problems to solve in healthtech, but hey, heck of a market size and plenty of impact to be made.

If you’re an analyst and want to get ahead of the curve with valuing the latest investment deals, I suggest picking this one up.

Pigeon insider is the upgraded newsletter for those of you that want deep research and to steal fantastic ideas to sound incredibly smart in front of everyone else.

Last week’s… Getting AI regulated. A not so practical guide.

I go through changes happening to the regulatory landscape and how tech stacks with AI and LLMs within them are getting regulated… and continue to iterate and keep getting regulated, which hasn’t really been possible until now.

Subscribe now

What to listen to 🔊

This week it’s Jamie Fox, co-Founder and CTO of Scarlet, Europe's only notified body specialised in software and AI medical devices. He built AI triage software at Babylon, which led him and co-founder James Dewar (also ex-Babylon, also previously a pod guest) to build a brand new notified body from the ground up, for iterative software… like AI 👀. Why does regulation create artificial bottlenecks for founders? What does it actually mean to certify an LLM as a medical device?… All in here.

Jennifer Dixon sits down with Ricardo Baptista Leite (CEO of Health AI) and Professor Alastair Denniston to dig into the newly formed National Commission into the Regulation of AI in Healthcare. Timely, given this week's news.

The workforce "boom and bust," why covid cost the NHS £20bn in lost care, and how the health service recovers while public spending stays squeezed.

Events 📅

Health Creators Connect (a SomX event, in partnership with Micropharm)
📅 13 July, 7 to 9pm
📍Atom Coffee, London W3
We (SomX), alongside MicroPharm, are bringing together the people who quietly run the UK’s healthcare content machine for an intimate, invitation-only evening. It’s off the record, it’s honest, it’s real and it’s a heck of a lot of valuable info if you’re a creator. Jessica from SomX is giving candid talk on the actual business of it - negotiating, working with brands, cash versus equity, hiring, getting paid properly, then a live AMA. If you make, shape or fund health content in the UK, get your application in. All will be revealed on why SomX can confidently talk on this, too… 🤫

Startup Lab x Specialist Briefings: AI Innovation vs Regulation, Is the UK Falling Behind or Playing It Safe?
📅 22 July
📍 🇬🇧 Hale House, London
UCLPartners and RADIANT CERSI team up for what’s shaping up to be the most on-the-nose session of the month, given everything above. If you want to argue about whether the UK’s AI regulatory approach is cautious or just slow, this is your room.

Pangaea Data: Transforming Neurology with AI Workshop
📅 14 July
📍 🇬🇧 London
A hands-on look at applying AI to neurology workflows. Useful if you’re building or buying in this space and want practical detail rather than a vendor pitch deck.

Digital Health Summer Schools
📅 16 to 17 July
📍 🇬🇧 UK
Two days with NHS CIOs, CCIOs and CNIOs, with three national digital leaders already confirmed. Less polished-keynote, more how-do-we-actually-do-this, which is the useful kind.

WHH Women’s Health Horizons London Autumn Summit
📅 22 September
📍 🇬🇧 Emirates Stadium, London
A way off yet, but given this week’s endometriosis and women’s health funding stories, worth having on the radar early.

ABHI UK HealthTech Conference 2026
📅 7 October
📍 🇬🇧 London
Two days covering the full regulatory-to-market-access pipeline, MHRA early engagement, NICE pathways, procurement, the lot. Early bird pricing ends today, so if it’s on your list, this is the day.

Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup for everything else.

Jobs & opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

AI Clinical Evaluation Workshop
📅 Thursday 13th August, 6:00–8:00 PM BST
🇬🇧 Waterloo, London
Invite-only session for clinicians (apply at the link), chaired by Microsoft's Global CMO, who'll open with remarks on AI's shifting role in healthcare. You’ll independently put multiple AI tools through real-world clinical tasks using synthetic patient records, which feeds into a comparative study report earmarked for publication, with participants acknowledged, so it's a proper evaluation. If you're a clinician and curious how the tools actually stack up, very much worth applying.

🎯 Offscript finds you the buyers that LinkedIn can’t: LinkedIn still doesn’t have a “healthtech” category, so if you’re selling into the NHS your best-fit buyers vanish somewhere between job titles, industry tags and keyword hacks. And let’s be honest, Sales Navigator and Apollo only get you so far. OffScript kills the filters. You describe who you’re after in plain English (”commercial leads at Series A digital health companies selling into the NHS”) and one search runs across every network at once. Every UK healthcare provider mapped and buying-intent signals layered on top. A new bit of plumbing for a lean BD team.

🩺 Head of Clinical Innovation, Doccla: Doccla runs virtual wards and remote monitoring for 60%+ of NHS ICBs, fresh off a £35m Series B. This is the senior clinical seat where product, regulation and evidence meet - clinical sign-off on features, DCB0129/0160 safety, the MDR evidence strategy. Needs a licensed UK GP with digital health chops. A proper frontier role for a clinician who wants authority over what ships.

🩺 NHS England is hiring a Clinical Lead for digital clinical safety: A registered clinician to lead NHS England's Digital Clinical Governance Framework, own clinical safety (DCB0129/0160) and manage a team of informaticians. Band 8c (£79.5k–£91.6k) or Medical Leader 1, fixed term to March 2027, any NHSE office. Your chance to stop bad tech reaching the bedside.

🇺🇸🗽 NXGN USA is growing

The US arm of the next-gen healthtech and biotech community is expanding its committee. If you’re an early-career founder, clinician or operator stateside and want a seat at the table to organise events and community (with a budget), message me and I’ll forward it onto Aakash and Athena.

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Healthtech Pigeon is produced by SomX - the media-led communications and creative agency for healthcare. We help healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector organisations tell sharper stories through strategy, PR, content, design, events and media production. Built by clinicians, scientists and creatives who know the space. Work with us.

🗞 Grab the newsletter at www.healthtechpigeon.com

✍️ Apply to be a podcast guest using this form: https://share.hsforms.com/1PkAwCjniQjiGl53i8dtZ8g3xer2

📖 Learn more about the SomX team at https://somx.health

Hello pigeoners. Not the most enthralling news week, but a few regulatory stories this week show that healthtech’s maturing, Claude Science launches if you have any energy left for new AI capabilities and a load of cool pods, jobs and events coming up. Enjoy.

News Bites 🥪

🐢 TORTUS clears UKCA Class IIa and the ambient-scribe category grows up: TORTUS is now the first ambient voice tool certified Class IIa on the UK’s own UKCA route, arguing (rightly) that a tool which actually writes the clinical note is doing device-grade work, not glorified dictation. Tandem was first to Class IIa via the EU MDR back in May, but to be honest, by what route or who did what “first” isn’t really what’s important here. It’s that “certified,” “registered” and “self-declared” mean three very different things, and buyers shouldn’t keep treating them as the same. If you’re procuring an ambient scribe on a Class I while Class IIa options exist, someone should be asking why.

🚨 The MHRA is receiving AI-written inspection responses that cite guidance which doesn’t exist: Literally everyone’s using LLMs for their homework aren’t they?Straight from the MHRA Inspectorate, companies are now submitting GxP inspection responses drafted by AI, referencing MHRA guidance that was never written. Completely wrong regulatory frameworks have been cited and in at least one case responding to a serious, patient-safety-impacting deficiency with material inaccuracies and invented references. One response ran to 90+ pages and addressed none of the actual findings - lolz.

🏛️ MHRA chief takes personalised medicine and AI to a parliamentary committee: Finishing off MHRA week, the chief exec presented evidence and recommendations on personalised medicine and AI to a parliamentary committee. Worth mentioning only because of the direction of travel, which was shared accountability, mandatory post-market surveillance and evidence before deployment. Regulation really isn’t backstage anymore, so if you’re building healthtech, the MHRA is now a stakeholder you design for from day one.

💊 Anthropic wants to make its own drugs: At an SF event on 30th June, Anthropic launched Claude Science, an AI “workbench” wired into 60+ research databases, and said it’ll run its own preclinical drug programmes aimed at neglected diseases. Love the vision of helping the underserved. Don’t love that it’s all preclinical, no disease targets named, and no word on what happens if they actually find something. Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan is on the board and essentially said ‘enough bold proclamations, now show results for patients.’ Good luck to them, I think. Let’s revisit when there’s a molecule and a peer-reviewed thing to read.

👁️ Moorfields and UCL link one million eye images to patient records to build AI tools: Moorfields and UCL have linked a million retinal images to patient records to… you guessed it… develop AI. Anterior segment conditions like cataracts blind millions, yet barely feature in imaging datasets, so they’ve released 945,243 images from 22,482 patients, linked to clinical records and gated properly with a patient advisory board and the Five Safes framework. Open health data done right. A biiiiiit unsettling was reading that one model can predict a patient's age and biological sex from a single scan, which means routine images carry signals we can't see and never agreed to hand over, but useful for research and worth watching what comes out of it.

📉 FDA lets Whoop keep its blood pressure feature after all: Remember when the FDA sent Whoop a strongly worded letter last July over its Blood Pressure Insights feature marketing itself as medical-grade? Well, Whoop tweaked a few things and the FDA updated its wellness guidance to carve out blood pressure as a ‘non-medical’ metric. Whoop’s CEO called it a “major development” on LinkedIn, which is an interesting way to describe successfully lobbying your way out of a warning letter.

Pigeon insider is the upgraded newsletter for those of you that want deep research, analysis and to steal the ideas to sound incredibly smart in front of everyone else.

This week’s… Getting AI regulated. A not so practical guide.

I go through changes happening to the regulatory landscape and how tech stacks with AI and LLMs within them are getting regulated… and continue to iterate and keep getting regulated, which hasn’t really been possible until now.

If you’re an analyst and want to get ahead of the curve with valuing the latest investment deals, I suggest picking this one up.

Subscribe now

What to listen to 🔊

Shravan Nageswaran is co-founder and CEO of Atman Labs and an all-round excellent human. Atman Labs is an applied-AI research company building diagnostic AI that reasons like a doctor and we cover why LLMs fall short on real clinical reasoning, what "safety" actually means when a system takes a patient history, and how reinforcement learning over a medical knowledge graph could reshape primary care.

Jordan Sollof sits down with Moorfields’ Dr Peter Thomas (yes, that Moorfields… see news above) and Alder Hey’s Kate Warriner to wrestle with the single patient record.

All that compute we’re constantly on about has to live somewhere, and it turns out "somewhere" is a less affluent area with a permanent hum and a massive water bill. Dr Jacoby Wilson walks through what actually happens when a data centre lands next door - useful reality check for anyone building the shiny stuff.

Events 📅

Health Creators Connect (a SomX event, in partnership with Micropharm)
📅 13 July, 7 to 9pm
📍Atom Coffee, London W3
We (SomX), alongside MicroPharm, are bringing together the people who quietly run the UK's healthcare content machine for an intimate, invitation-only evening. It’s off the record, it’s honest, it’s real and it’s a heck of a lot of valuable info if you’re a creator. Jessica from SomX is giving candid talk on the actual business of it - negotiating, working with brands, cash versus equity, hiring, getting paid properly, then a live AMA. If you make, shape or fund health content in the UK, get your application in. All will be revealed on why SomX can confidently talk on this, too… 🤫

Women in Biotech, Canary Wharf
📅 8 July, 16:00–20:00
🇬🇧 25 Churchill Place, Canary Wharf, London
An evening on how biotech leaders build and navigate relationships with investors, hosted by the BioIndustry Association. Insight, connection and conversation, with a glass of something in hand.

AireFest 2026
📅 9 July
🇬🇧 Leeds Aire
Logic’s healthtech festival heads to Leeds, a welcome reminder that the sector exists north of the M25. Worth the train.

Safe Enough? Building Trust in AI for Mental Health (MHIN)
📅 10 July, 9:30am to 1:30pm
📍 🇬🇧 Hale House, London
The Mental Health Innovation Network’s morning of honest debate on one of the trickier corners of the AI conversation: how much trust mental health tools have actually earned. Given half this week’s bites are effectively a seminar on AI safety and the limits of the evidence, it’s well timed. And Hale House events are always worth a look.

Digital Health Summer Schools
📅 16 to 17 July
📍 🇬🇧 UK
Two days with NHS CIOs, CCIOs and CNIOs, with three national digital leaders already confirmed. Less polished-keynote, more how-do-we-actually-do-this, which is the useful kind.

Women’s Health Week Europe
📅 7 to 8 October
📍 🇬🇧 Emirates Stadium, London
A way off, but flagged now because pre-agenda pricing (savings of up to £600) ends midnight Friday 26 June. If it’s on your list, today’s the day to book.

Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup for everything else.

Jobs & opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

🩺 Clinical Innovation Lead, UK Public Sector Healthcare, AWS: (London) Clinically-trained-only role shaping AWS’s multi-year NHS bets - agentic triage, genomics, population health. If you can survive a ministerial briefing and an architecture review in the same afternoon, check it out.

📚 Senior Editor, The Lancet Global Health (part-time, fixed-term): Lead acquisition and peer review at one of the world’s most-cited global-health journals. For the clinician-academic who’s spent years muttering “I could edit this better” at other people’s papers, here’s your chance to prove it. Fair warning… there’s an editorial test, so dust off your critical appraisal.

🩸 Many roles, Hertility Health (London, hybrid). The CQC-approved at-home hormone and fertility testing company is hiring across clinical and commercial as it scales its “reproductively responsible” employer play. Bonus for readers hunting specifically in this space… the In Women’s Health job board might be a useful bookmark.

📣 Want something in front of our 8,000+ readers?

You can break your news as the main story, feature a podcast, job or event... and we even have a few sponsorship packages to choose from...

Break your news

Feature a job, podcast, event

Sponsor Pigeon

We review everything editorially - if it is not right for our audience, we’ll let you know. Everything has to be valuable to this glorious community.

See you next week, Pigeon fans ✌🏼

Healthtech Pigeon is produced by SomX - the media-led communications and creative agency for healthcare. We help healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector organisations tell sharper stories through strategy, PR, content, design, events and media production. Built by clinicians, scientists and creatives who know the space. Work with us.

🗞 Grab the newsletter at www.healthtechpigeon.com

✍️ Apply to be a podcast guest using this form: https://share.hsforms.com/1PkAwCjniQjiGl53i8dtZ8g3xer2

📖 Learn more about the SomX team at https://somx.health

Hey Insiders, if you read the last edition you’ll know that the classic VC fundraising journey isn’t exactly clicking with healthtech at scale… and things are really changing out there as a result. I talked about the cost to build technology collapsing, which opens up other funding models, and this week, we’re analysing another variable in the whole equ…

Read more

Hello healthtechies. Very cool that we passed 8000 subscribers this week. People tend to call Pigeon “useful and a bit of comic relief,” which is exactly what we’re going for, so I’m glad it’s doing its job.

A big annual survey is coming to see what you’d like more or less of and any new ideas you have for how this can stay useful and entertaining. Stay tuned for that.

And if you missed HLTH Europe last week and still can’t deal with the FOMO, Harvinder (from Motics) and I had a chat about that and a few other bits from last week. Enjoy.

News Bites 🥪

🩻 We now have a UK NHS waiting-times comparison - you can truly choose your hospital: Meet HospitalWaits.co.uk, built single-handedly by Dr Mustafa Ghafouri on top of NHS England’s own Referral-to-Treatment data. You type a specialty, and a postcode, and it ranks every hospital by waiting time, shows you the distance, tells you how many weeks you’d save by switching AND auto-drafts a Right-to-Choose letter to your GP so you can go wherever you like to get it done. For example, you’re looking at a 2 week wait on the Isle of Wight vs a 21 week wait in Coventry for parotid surgery. The data’s technically been “public” for years (hidden in a 49,000-row monthly spreadsheet), but easy for AI to solve and this is now an unbelievable innovation for patient choice. Great work all round.

🩸 A Healthtech Story With Zero AI In It, Somehow: Bleeding to death is not ideal, and for donkey’s years* the fix has been has been tourniquets, but people apply them wrong, can’t crank the windlass** hard enough and it doesn’t end well. The chief surgeon of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said it’s the number one cause of death in the field. Norwegian company, Aristeia, has spent a decade building a new, mechanical tourniquet with a transmission system that gets you to arterial occlusion in a couple of pulls, no brute strength required, no sensors, no companion app. Developed with the Norwegian Armed Forces and actually heading to end users in Ukraine. Healthtech doesn’t have to be complicated. Excellent work again.

🤝 Pastest buys Medics’ Money, and the “doctor life-admin” stack quietly consolidates: Every UK doctor has rage-revised with Pastest for 50-odd years and now they’re expanding their scope. They’ve acquired Medics’ Money, which, again, if you’re a UK medic, you’ll know is the only real place you can go for sensible, unbiased financial education. Dr Tommy Perkins and Dr Ed Cantelo are the founders, I was actually on their podcast a very long time ago and what a podcast it is by the way. Regularly appears in the top overall charts of the medicine category and highly recommend any episode except mine if you want financial education. Awesome to see a company like Medics Money getting acquired and seeing the good guys win.

💰 J&J and BGF pile into TRIMTECH, taking its Cambridge seed round to £35.6m Now heavily capitalised in a second way, TRIMTECH Therapeutics creates potent “degraders” that selectively target the removal of toxic proteins to treat intractable CNS and inflammatory disorders and they’ve done a particularly punchy $47m (£35.6m) seed round. Johnson & Johnson’s venture arm (JJDC) and BGF are the latest to join a cap table that already has Pfizer Ventures, Eli Lilly and Cambridge Innovation Capital nestled in it. Could be going places, this. By the way, a £35m “seed” is a pleasant reminder that biotech plays by entirely different rules to the rest of healthtech, so don’t go getting any ideas (or ambition) around raising that amount if you’re not completely altering human physiology.

🩸 The World's First Smart Menstrual Cup Clears the Regulators: The Emm Cup has just picked up UKCA marking and MHRA registration, so it’s now officially the first regulatory-cleared smart menstrual cup. It’s medical-grade silicone that passively measures flow volume and cycle patterns, syncing to an encrypted app when it's docked in its case. That means instead of inferring the cycle from proxies like temperature and heart rate, measuring flow gives a new, important and very informative phenotypic baseline. As that dataset grows, conditions like endometriosis and menorrhagia become more understood and the data gap keeps reducing.

♀️ The EU has finally put “women’s health blind spot” in writing: Talking of the data gap, The European Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality wants to see a full report on the exact systemic inequality in women’s health research, diagnosis and treatment that we’re talking about. And that’s because of the familiarly grim numbers that won’t surprise you… 72% of drug trials don’t break their data down by sex… 5% of global R&D funding goes to women’s health. None of this is new information, and a committee nodding a report through is several galaxies away from anyone funding it, BUT the full Parliament votes in September, at which point we'll see whether things actually happen (specific research funding and/or mandating sex-disaggregated data could become policy)… or just another report.

🤖 Meanwhile, the UK throws £8m at specific AIs to shrink waiting lists: Not as a direct consequence of Mustafa highlighting it above, but not, not relevant, the NIHR’s i4i programme has made it rain to the tune of £8,136,409 across six AI projects trying to cut NHS waiting times and broadly improve care. Headline-grabbers are the imaging tools, (gotta love the name) SAMURAI-CT for head CTs, SMART-XR reporting CXRs autonomously, an AI-ECG heart failure screen and even a digital therapy for kids with tic disorders. These are funded evaluations, so discharge times and workflow are actually measured, rather than just model accuracy on a tidy test set, so encouraging for sticky adoption.

🧠 And finally...

Imagine never needing to go to sleep… maximising shareholder value 24 hours a day…. well… that dream could soon be a reality.

Scientists have worked out how to get the benefits of sleep without sleeping, and the internet has lost its mind. The actual study, in Nature Neuroscience, comes from Tononi and Cirelli’s lab, the same people behind the synaptic-homeostasis hypothesis (TLDR on that hypothesis is “sleep is the price the brain pays for plasticity”). Using optogenetics (using light on neurons), they induced sleep-like on/off cortical rhythms in sleep-deprived mice and managed to lower local “sleep pressure,”*** reduce markers of synaptic strength, and rescue memory performance back to well-rested levels. I cannot wait to see what Bryan Johnson does with this information. Someone please tag him.

Pigeon insider is the upgraded newsletter for those of you that want deep research, analysis and to steal the ideas to sound incredibly smart in front of everyone else.

This week’s is epic, if I do say so.

Has venture capital worked in healthtech? Yes and No.

I deep dive what’s worked, what hasn’t, the past, present and future of venture capital in our space, as well as the myriad of other mechanisms to fund a business. There are bootstrapped healthtech companies with their tech across 90 NHS sites and there are companies worth $4.2B through venture rounds now worth nothing. There’s no right and wrong, but there is a right and wrong for your business, and this moment in time.

Read all about it.

Subscribe now

What to listen to 🔊

This week is the first of a few journalist interviews I’m sprinkling amongst the usual guests. Cate Lawrence, who brings a decade of cross-sector reporting (wearables, women's health data, Ukrainian healthtech, the push for European digital sovereignty) talks about how stories actually get chosen, what makes a startup worth covering, and why the gap between innovation and clinical impact stays so stubbornly wide.

Peter Birch and a panel of Australian digital health leaders (Monash Health, eHealth NSW, St Vincent's) get refreshingly honest about what it actually takes to make healthcare tech work in a real clinical setting… co-designing with clinicians, wrangling legacy systems, and building a business case that finance will actually sign off etc..

Shaun Hockey, spent 22 years building Medacy while the NHS reorganised itself around him roughly once a fortnight. Good, honest stuff on entrepreneurship, PCNs, and unglamorous bits of healthcare leadership in this one. And Tara’s predictably excellent.

On Jing’s latest episode, Dr Meenakshi Jhala explains how she went from fifth-year medical student with zero finance background to co-founding DX Capital, a clinician-led angel syndicate funding the things clinicians actually know healthcare needs. Useful listen if you're a doctor eyeing the investor side of the table and wondering where to start.

Events 📅

Health Creators Connect (a SomX event, in partnership with Micropharm)
📅 13 July, 7 to 9pm
📍Atom Coffee, London W3
We (SomX), alongside MicroPharm, are bringing together the people who quietly run the UK's healthcare content machine for an intimate, invitation-only evening. It’s off the record, it’s honest, it’s real and it’s a heck of a lot of valuable info if you’re a creator. Jessica from SomX is giving candid talk on the actual business of it - negotiating, working with brands, cash versus equity, hiring, getting paid properly, then a live AMA. If you make, shape or fund health content in the UK, get your application in. All will be revealed on why SomX can confidently talk on this, too… 🤫

GITEX AI Europe
📅 30 June to 1 July
📍 🇩🇪
Berlin Europe’s big AI showcase, healthtech included. Go if you want to see where the wider AI hype is heading and pick the genuinely-clinical needles out of the very large haystack.

HealthTech Integrates 2026
📅 1 July
📍 🇬🇧 ARC, West London
An in-person day on healthcare-tech innovation and, more usefully, the kind of networking where actual deals get done rather than just LinkedIn connection requests. Worth it if you’re trying to get something adopted rather than just admired.

King’s Fund Digital Health and AI Conference 2026
📅 Tuesday 30 June
🇬🇧 The King’s Fund, Cavendish Square, London
A full day cutting through the AI noise: what is real, what is next, and what is at stake. Expect the NHS App as digital front door, ambient AI, and a mini hackathon, with the MHRA chief exec and NHS England’s AI policy lead on the bill.

HealthTech Integrates 2026
📅 1 July
🇬🇧 ARC, West London
An in-person day on healthcare technology innovation, integration and the networking that actually moves things forward.

Women in Biotech, Canary Wharf
📅 8 July, 16:00–20:00
🇬🇧 25 Churchill Place, Canary Wharf, London
An evening on how biotech leaders build and navigate relationships with investors, hosted by the BioIndustry Association. Insight, connection and conversation, with a glass of something in hand.

AireFest 2026
📅 9 July
🇬🇧 Leeds Aire
Logic’s healthtech festival heads to Leeds, a welcome reminder that the sector exists north of the M25. Worth the train.

Safe Enough? Building Trust in AI for Mental Health (MHIN)
📅 10 July, 9:30am to 1:30pm
📍 🇬🇧 Hale House, London
The Mental Health Innovation Network’s morning of honest debate on one of the trickier corners of the AI conversation: how much trust mental health tools have actually earned. Given half this week’s bites are effectively a seminar on AI safety and the limits of the evidence, it’s well timed. And Hale House events are always worth a look.

Digital Health Summer Schools
📅 16 to 17 July
📍 🇬🇧 UK
Two days with NHS CIOs, CCIOs and CNIOs, with three national digital leaders already confirmed. Less polished-keynote, more how-do-we-actually-do-this, which is the useful kind.

Women’s Health Week Europe
📅 7 to 8 October
📍 🇬🇧 Emirates Stadium, London
A way off, but flagged now because pre-agenda pricing (savings of up to £600) ends midnight Friday 26 June. If it’s on your list, today’s the day to book.

Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup for everything else.

Jobs & opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

🩺 Clinical Product Director, Alertive (UK, hybrid) Alertive makes the clinical communication infrastructure that lets you coordinate in real time instead of fighting disconnected systems, and it's now live across 50-plus hospitals. This is the rare clinical role with genuine product ownership - you'd own the roadmap, sit between product, commercial and clinical safety, and be the voice in the room with medical directors and CNIOs. Emergency medicine background and a couple of years in a healthtech startup would be ideal, it's remote, Series A equity, and they'll happily keep you in one PA per week to stay sharp.

🛠️ Implementation Manager, Patchwork Health (UK) As you well know, Patchwork builds the staff-bank and temporary-staffing rails that keep NHS rotas from collapsing. This is the role for someone who finds genuine satisfaction in making a thing actually land in a trust, not just demo well in a sales deck.

🚀 PharmStars Fall 2026 cohort (Boston-based, applies globally) Not a job, an opportunity: PharmStars is the pharma-focused accelerator for digital health startups, and this cohort’s theme is “Digital Innovations in Immunology.” Graduates get a $100k SAFE plus structured routes into pharma partnerships, which is the bit most digital health founders find hardest to engineer on their own. If you’ve got a market-ready tool in immunological prevention, diagnosis, treatment or patient care, worth a look.

James’ editor notes:

* Donkey's years started as a pun on donkey's ears. Donkeys have famously long ears, so "as long as a donkey's ears" became a way of saying "ages.” Then "ears" became "years" which kinda made sense because donkeys actually do live a long time… 40-50 years!

** Not the Bradford and Hull City striker, that’s Dean Windass. Windlass means a winch. The thing you pull to make it tighter. I’m sure you got that from context.

*** Apologies for triggering anyone with young children. If you know the term ‘sleep pressure’ then I know you also know about ‘sleep consultants’ and have had a load of unsolicited advice thrown at you before recruiting one. Yes Karen, I have tried waking them up from their daytime nap and having a nighttime routine. Shut the f…

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Healthtech Pigeon is produced by SomX - the media-led communications and creative agency for healthcare. We help healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector organisations tell sharper stories through strategy, PR, content, design, events and media production. Built by clinicians, scientists and creatives who know the space. Work with us.

00:00 - Intro
01:49 - A doctor built the NHS waiting-times comparison the e-RS dashboard won’t give you

14:03 - Pastest buys Medics’ Money, and the “doctor life-admin” stack quietly consolidates

21:02 -Meanwhile, the NHS throws £8m at AI to shrink those same waiting lists

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📖 Learn more about the SomX team at https://somx.health

Hey friends. Sorry it’s an hour late, I was figuring out how to embed that Midjourney video below, which was 100% worth it and you’ll see when you get to it. Anyway…

Guess what? We just hit… Three. Hundred Editions. And Eight. Thousand. Subscribers.

Jokes (and readers) in their thousands and not a single comedy award, so if nothing else, we’re living proof that consistency beats talent 🐦

Thanks to all you superb humans for reading and rest assured that we’ll stave off the robot revolution in the written word for as long as possible.

We’re not ones to dwell on our milestones when fittingly hilarious stories remain un-broken-down, so let’s crack on…

And here’s to the next 300 and 8000… (if the robots let us) 🥂

James 🫡

News Bites 🥪

🛁 Midjourney now wants to scan your whole body in a hot tub: I honestly had to read this in 4 separate places before I believed that a company built on the premise of creating fake images is now going to be involved in creating medical imaging. Ultrasounds to be exact. Loads of them. While you’re in a bath. In a spa. Kind of. ☝🏼 That’s their promo video and it’s wild. This is genuinely a full-body ultrasound scanner that images you in about 60 seconds while you descend through a (kinda glorious) pool of golden light. The grand plan is a flagship “Midjourney Spa” in San Francisco by the end of 2027, scaling to 50,000 scanners doing a billion scans a month by 2031. Yes, this is alongside the day job. No, I’m not sure what the evidence base is. Yes, this does feel similar to full body MRI hype. No, I will not be getting one just yet.*

🩺 The AI that has caught 20,000 cancers now runs on your phone: Skin Analytics stole the show at HLTH Europe by announcing that DERM Zero is now certified to Class III, the EU’s highest medical device bar, i.e. the same one pacemakers and other lifesaving interventional and diagnostic mega-devices sit in. It autonomously assesses a skin lesion from a standard smartphone (no dermoscope and no hospital appointment needed). Frankly, these are words that usually cause one’s pelvic floor to involuntarily contract if you’re of a regulatory persuasion, but Neil Daly has been at this now for the past 13 years and has the credibility and results to prove it. DERM’s run inside 24 NHS hospitals for the last 6 years, assessed 230,000-odd patients, picked up more than 20,000 cancers, and every one of those is validated against histopathology. Low-concern lesions get definitively cleared without a second clinician looking. Now is the time for care to be reorganised.

💊 Children Aren't Small Adults (Their Prescriptions Finally Agree): From my days as an anaesthetist, I remember paediatric prescribing being a nightmare of weight-based maths, age-specific formulations and precise calculations with a horrible, looking threat of error, historically done by manually transcribing the dose into either the EPR or some rogue app on your phone coded by the ‘innovative one’ on the ward, just hoping you didn't fat-finger a decimal point or some internal calc was off. Thankfully, West London Children's Healthcare is now the first NHS org to embed all four of the RCPCH/NPPG safe-prescribing requirements into a live workflow, so patient-specific orders go straight into Cerner, with the clinician doing the final sign-off. If you’ve worked in paediatrics, you’ll understand how a study of 1,808 orders found error rates that went from 7.1% to 1.2% when this very sensible tool was used.

💊 The Wegovy pill is here. The MHRA approves the UK’s first GLP-1 weight-loss tablet: Here we go. The MHRA has approved oral semaglutide (Wegovy in pill form), so the UK is now the first in Europe to greenlight a GLP-1 weight-loss tablet. Credit where it’s due, in OASIS 4** the daily pill matched the weekly jab at around 14% weight loss. There is a slight faff in that you take it fasted, with a sip of water, then nothing by mouth for half an hour, or absorption tanks, but that’s nothing compared to a needle. Needless needles means it’s now needleless*** which is WAY easier. Now you pull a wave of new demand into a system that's already rationing the jabs, and this one still isn't on the NHS, with NICE yet to rule and a private script running about £150 a month. Which means, predictably, the people who get it first are likely going to be the ones in the richer postcodes. The Inverse Care Law playing out in real time, right in-front of us. A cheaper, friendlier pill, same two-tier problem.

🇪🇸 Spain is putting €18m behind women’s health research: Pedro Sánchez has tripled Spain's women's health R&D budget to €18m a year, under the bluntly titled (slight loss in translation) "We are. We count: Ending discrimination against women in health research." I know, I know, €18m is a rounding error in any kind of national science spending and if it was the UK I’d be quick to judge, so please do file it under the usual “that’s a good amount because it sounds like a lot” political theatre. But I like the fact that the Prime Minister of Spain has said out loud that there is a programme to “end discrimination against women in health research.” And that trials were run on men, drugs tested on men, diagnostics built for men… we all know the evidence backs him. Small money, (hopefully) loud signal and more to come.

And finally...

⚖️ Remember That 5% You Promised Back In 2014?: Sword Health, Portugal's MSK-focused virtual care unicorn, is (not so) casually being sued for up to €200 million by A2 Academy, an accelerator that baby Sword joined in 2014 in return for (what is now a whopping) 5% of the company. Those shares never materialised, and now that Sword is worth a fortune, someone at A2 must’ve recently turned round in a meeting and said “weren’t they on the accelerator?”**** And they would now very much like their cut. To be fair, who wouldn’t? Much of the fight hinges on whether the statute of limitations has expired, plus an accusation that Sword quietly spun up a Delaware entity without flagging it. Remember, folks, the term sheet you scribble in the early excitement has a habit of resurfacing when you’re worth a few billion. But hey, what’s a couple hundred million at that point anyway 🤷🏻‍♂️

Pigeon insider is the upgraded newsletter for those of you that want deep research, analysis and to steal the ideas to sound incredibly smart in front of everyone else.

This week’s is epic, if I do say so.

Has venture capital worked in healthtech? Yes and No.

I deep dive what’s worked, what hasn’t, the past, present and future of venture capital in our space, as well as the myriad of other mechanisms to fund a business. There are bootstrapped healthtech companies with their tech at 90 NHS sites and there are companies worth $4.2B through venture rounds now worth nothing. There’s no right and wrong, but there is a right and wrong for your business and this moment in time.

Read all about it.

Subscribe now

What to listen to 🔊

This week I chatted with long time friend, Ben Finlay, to dig into mental health. Specifically why patient-reported questionnaires are still used (and what we lose because of that), and what a taste test, a blood biomarker and a continuum view of neurological wellness could change. This one’s a very candid look at where pharma, policy and AI are heading next.

For our 300th Pigeon, we couldn’t resist. If you haven’t listened to it yet - ok i't’s majority not healthtech, but it’s epic. For this ep, Michael and Hannah stand beside a working Tesla coil, explain the physics behind the miniature lightning, and then tell the genuinely true story of how Nikola Tesla fell for a white pigeon he claimed to love "as a man loves a woman."

Events 📅

🐣 Hash It Out: Real-World Innovation Implementation
📅 Tuesday 23 June, 17:30
🇬🇧 Hale House, 76 Portland Place, London
Hale House’s community evening on what it actually takes to move healthtech from pilot to adoption. Free, and going fast.

HIMSS AI Leadership Summit + AI in Healthcare Forum
📅 24 June (Summit), 25–26 June (Forum)
🇺🇸 Renaissance Boston Seaport District, Boston
The Summit is an invite-only gathering of senior healthcare executives working through AI governance, implementation and risk, with no keynote theatre, just structured roundtables and a private dinner. The open Forum that follows goes deep on real-world AI across clinical, operational and enterprise domains.

UK Longevity Festival + Women’s Health Summit (led by Hertility)
📅 26–27 June
🇬🇧 London
The UK’s first longevity festival, with women’s health front and centre via a dedicated Summit led by Hertility, plus an expo, headline talks and a B2B conference for founders, investors and clinicians. Given Spain just put real money behind women’s health this week, the timing could not be better.

King’s Fund Digital Health and AI Conference 2026
📅 Tuesday 30 June
🇬🇧 The King’s Fund, Cavendish Square, London
A full day cutting through the AI noise: what is real, what is next, and what is at stake. Expect the NHS App as digital front door, ambient AI, and a mini hackathon, with the MHRA chief exec and NHS England’s AI policy lead on the bill.

HealthTech Integrates 2026
📅 1 July
🇬🇧 ARC, West London
An in-person day on healthcare technology innovation, integration and the networking that actually moves things forward.

Women in Biotech, Canary Wharf
📅 8 July, 16:00–20:00
🇬🇧 25 Churchill Place, Canary Wharf, London
An evening on how biotech leaders build and navigate relationships with investors, hosted by the BioIndustry Association. Insight, connection and conversation, with a glass of something in hand.

AireFest 2026
📅 9 July
🇬🇧 Leeds Aire
Logic’s healthtech festival heads to Leeds, a welcome reminder that the sector exists north of the M25. Worth the train.

Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup for everything else.

Jobs for humans🕵️‍♀️

🔬 Director, Clinical Science at WHOOP: WHOOP wants someone to build out the clinical evidence behind its wearable, with a heavy focus on Software as a Medical Device. You'd own clinical strategy across the whole product lifecycle, from feasibility and study design through to FDA and CE Mark submissions and post-market evidence. Boston-based and on-site, so you'll need to fancy the commute.

⚙️ Director, Clinical Operations at WHOOP: The sister role to the Clinical Science gig. If that one ☝🏼 designs the studies, this one runs them. You'd own study execution end to end, from startup and recruitment through monitoring and closeout, across both in-house decentralised trials and CRO-managed work, all under GCP and ISO 14155. It's the operational engine behind WHOOP's push to make its wearable claims regulator-proof. Also Boston, also on-site, also a generous equity package if you're tempted.

🛠️ Ditto is hiring two engineers: We mentioned Ditto last month - they’re the Rotterdam team building an app that records your medical appointments, summarises them in plain English and lets you share the lot with loved ones. It launched in July, hit #1 in the Dutch App Store, picked up backing from insurer Menzis and is past 50,000 users, so this is early-and-moving rather than early-and-hoping. They want a (Senior) Infra/Backend Engineer to own the backend end to end, infra through devops, security baked in from day one, and a Senior Mobile Engineer to take full ownership of the iOS and Android apps in SwiftUI and Kotlin. Both are Rotterdam hybrid.

James’ editor notes:

* A few things worth noting before you cancel that MRI. The actual imaging physics is licensed from Butterfly Network, so the clever bit isn’t really Midjourney’s. The MRI-quality and picometre-resolution claims have also had precisely zero independent validation, and for now it only produces “body composition maps” because anything diagnostic needs FDA clearance it does not yet have. Is the spa the funnel and the real product a billion bodies’ worth of training data? I don’t know, but Pigeon will book a slot the day a peer-reviewed paper lands. Not a moment before.

** There’s a joke about the band / taking pills in there somewhere but, it’s late and I need to get this out.

*** Did you get your head around that one? OGs will remember the time I put that in a Pigeon headline.

**** This is 100% a dramatisation and does not reflect real events and Pigeon does not want to be dragged into the law suit.

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Healthtech Pigeon is produced by SomX - the media-led communications and creative agency for healthcare. We help healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector organisations tell sharper stories through strategy, PR, content, design, events and media production. Built by clinicians, scientists and creatives who know the space. Work with us.

🗞 Grab the newsletter at www.healthtechpigeon.com

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📖 Learn more about the SomX team at https://somx.health

Babylon raised hundreds of millions, listed at a $4.2bn valuation and two years later was sold for parts. It was the most famous company UK healthtech had ever produced and it did everything the venture playbook asked for. Raised enormous sums and sold the dream. I interviewed Ali Parsa about it on my podcast a while ago and I actually saw him at HLTH Europe yesterday and had a brief chat. Essentially, the venture model can work to build a big UK healthtech business. It just hasn’t. Yet. If you define ‘big’ as ‘a successful IPO,’ anyway.

On the other hand, Open Medical, run by an orthopaedic surgeon called Harry Lykostratis, has quietly (and profitably) put its software into more than 90 NHS sites without taking venture capital. Yep. A bootstrapped healthtech company with scale.

Healthtech has, arguably, spent most of its short life treating the VC model as ‘serious’ and bootstrapping as ‘charmingly irrelevant.’ But the reality is that I’m noticing a shift that Harry was part of way before it was cool. It feels like we’ve only ever properly learned to use one kind of capital because it’s been essential in order to bring products to market, and it’s been readily available. But recent times have been challenging to raise money, tech costs far less to build, there’s an AI>humans narrative and doubling revenues year on year isn’t appealing in healthcare at all. All this is forcing a different attitude, i.e. to running extremely lean and avoiding VC altogether. Or at least for as long as you can.

The conveyor belt

For about fifteen years, there’s been a common playbook - raise a small seed round for some equity, build an MVP, make a few sales, raise a Series A, then a B, then a C, each one bigger and each one from broadly the same pool of investors reading broadly the same emails. On my podcast a while back, Ash Patel, who, coincidentally, was one of the first employees at Babylon, now runs capital markets advisory at the investment bank Houlihan Lokey. He called it the conveyor belt, and talked with me about how automatic it’s become and how founders can assume that because they once took angel or seed money, the conveyor belt is the only way forward.

I assume the script for this came from a mixture of biotech and SaaS, where, in both, it does genuinely work. Biotech needs hundreds of millions and the best part of a decade before it earns a penny, and it has a well-understood buyer waiting at the end (big pharma). SaaS, interestingly, runs on the opposite logic of cheap to build, almost no marginal cost per new customer, recurring revenue, and a land-grab. Pour money in early to take the market before anyone else does. Healthtech borrowed the ambition of the first and the speed/scale instincts of the second, but I guess I’ve always seen it as a bit of a square peg in a round hole.

Healthtech carries biotech's regulatory weight without the clean pharma exit, and it sells software like SaaS without the frictionless path to the customer, because a healthtech buyer almost never behaves like a SaaS one. Whether it is a public system like the NHS, an insurer weighing actuarial proof, a self-insured employer chasing a return on its benefits spend, or a hospital counting the cost of switching, the sale is slow, evidence-hungry and institutional, and the one paying is hardly ever the one using the thing. So none of that favours a land-grab.

And here’s the kicker…

Read more

Sup gang. So Claude’s Fable model got released this week cueing the usual exhaustion and overwhelm from being told that “this model changes everything.” I can confirm that for most it has changed nothing. Happy people are still very happy. And chronically unproductive workaholics now have another tool and another reason to say how busy they are. Excellent.

Here’s a tip though… rather than burning through some planet-warming tokens for the sheer heck of it, connect Claude to your emails, Slack, call transcripts, CRM and anything else you can think of and ask Fable to “look through all my connectors and tell me what you can build to make my life easier.” If you’re lucky, something on there might be useful. If not, recycle that tip on LinkedIn for a few likes either way.

Anyway, this week, 505,000 NHS staff are getting Copilot and the MPS (medical defence lawyers) immediately asked who gets sued when it goes wrong. Also, Apple has finally noticed that half its users go through the menopause.

News Bites 🥪

📎 The NHS just gave 505,000 staff a Copilot: Strong start. NHS England confirmed that it’s rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot to 505,000 clinicians and support staff. Remember the trial thing they did before? 30,000 people, 90 orgs, saved staff an average of 43 minutes a day… yeah, this follows that. Full rollout due by October. A minor point is that the same trial found Copilot occasionally hallucinated incorrect medication dosages in draft letters and tripped over niche clinical terminology, but hey, it’s being rolled out at ludicrous scale, so I’m sure that’s sorted.

⚖️ And here’s who gets sued when the Copilot is wrong: And right on cue, the Medical Protection Society said the NHS could be sued for negligence when an AI tool gets it wrong, which leaves clinicians as (wait for it) the “liability sink” for systems they didn’t build, train or choose. Awesome. Surprisingly enough, “liability sink” is only the 14th most ridiculous term used in recent years to describe the people that go to work in sh** conditions for sh** pay and save your and your family’s lives. The top 13?

• Militant. Daily Mail, Wes Streeting.

• Self-indulgent. Independent, Wes Streeting.

• Dangerous. Independent, same man.

• Juvenile delinquents. Yep, actual phrase, Independent.

• Workshy. Daily Mail.

• Greedy and entitled. Daily Mail.

• Bungling. Mail Online.

• Perverted. Mail Online.

• “Lucky” to work part-time. Telegraph.

• Lazy. Oxford study analysing literature, published in BJGP

• Selfish. Same study

• Sexually disinhibited. Unbelievably, this isn’t a joke, it’s the same study.

• Violent. Same study, the note it ends on.

Can’t think why they’re leaving the NHS. Can you?

💰 Semble raises £30m to glue outpatients together: Not the actual people, we obviously mean the tech. Whopper of a Series C here for one interoperable platform that plugs into 1,200-odd external tools (diagnostics, billing, labs). They reckon more than 10 million patients (roughly 1/6 people in the UK), have now received care from a clinician using it. Pigeon has a soft spot for the unglamorous plumbing of healthcare, because the plumbing is usually where it all goes wrong. Interoperability getting a £30m cheque instead of a strongly worded strategy document? We’ll take it.

💃 Apple’s Health app discovers the menopause exists: At WWDC this week, Apple announced that its Health app is adding perimenopause and menopause support to its existing cycle-tracking feature, which, you know, is double edged. On one hand, a $trillion company finally building for a demographic the entire industry spent two decades ignoring is a genuine win, and their phenomenal distribution makes it meaningful. On the other, it feels like women’s health startups have been screaming into the void about exactly this for at least a decade. Is there going to be any clinical depth? Who knows. The bar has been raised by the founders and teams we talk about here often, so let’s see what happens.

🩺 Joyvié raises £771k to fix a problem nobody wants to talk about: Faecal incontinence affects around 656 million people worldwide and has seen pretty much zero product innovation in decades. What’s on the market now traps stool against the skin (causing breakdown, infection and a quiet loss of dignity), but Joyvié’s patent-pending design captures it in a disposable pouch, claiming around 90% less skin contact and 70% faster changes in early testing. Founder Zoe Robson built it after watching her father lose his dignity to a nappy in his final weeks. Exactly the kind of unglamorous, high-burden, carers-shoulder-most-of-it problem that we love to skip in favour of another longevity app. Pigeon is firmly in this nest. More of this, please.

🏥 01Health raises €12.9m to drag specialist care out of the hospital: London’s 01Health (previously 32co) has banked a €12.9m ($15m) Series A to scale a platform that lets local clinics deliver specialist care that normally lives in hospitals and big-city centres. It’s a fascinating model and I looked into it in detail for Pigeon insider. It’s founded by former NHS doctor (and ex-BCG) Dr Sonia Szamocki, (who I also had on The Healthtech Podcast) and it’s launching as a standalone product other clinics can license, with US trials underway. One to watch if you’ve ever been referred by your GP and the appointment you waited months for took 2 seconds, which left you wondering “what a waste.”

And finally…

🍫Rem3dy Health raises €16m for personalised nutrition (and, er, pet health): Birmingham’s Rem3dy Health, parent of personalised-nutrition brand Nourished, has raised €16m (£14m) to push into the US, MENA and India. They’re also moving into, and Pigeon promises this is real, personalised health solutions for pets. We have questions. Mostly about the dog’s macros. Jokes aside, a regional UK scale-up closing a strategic round in this climate is no small thing, and given my brummy routes I’m glad we have something to be proud of alongside being voted worst regional accent with a net score of minus 53. People actually went out of their way to vote us down. Bit harsh.

Pigeon insider is the upgraded newsletter for those of you that want deep research, analysis and to steal the ideas to sound incredibly smart in front of everyone else.

This week’s edition looks at two separate ultrasound AI companies that I recently had on The Healthtech Podcast. The founders are from completely different backgrounds, but both companies have great traction, great tech, regulatory approval and could each be generationally important.

For investors, founders and buyers, this one has everything about the ultrasound AI market that you need to know.

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What to listen to 🔊

This week I sat down with THE Professor Shafi Ahmed and we had a superb chat about at what it actually takes to innovate inside a system designed to resist change. He also shared from his perspective what is was like streaming a live colectomy on Google Glass to 14,500 students in 118 countries and how that experience transformed surgical innovation. Whopper episode.

Also a whopper episode. Deborah Cohen, the award winning, medically qualified broadcaster, journalist and editor, joins host Annabel for a discussion exploring how social media has become a major source of health information (right up our street) and how it is reshaping the way medical ideas, diagnoses, and treatments are promoted and consumed.

Resources 📚

🧭 Curious about a move into healthtech?: For any clinicians weighing up a career in healthtech, Dr Yath Prem has written a whopping 105 pages covering how the ecosystem works, translating clinical experience into business language, CVs, interviews, salary and equity, and 50 UK companies to follow. And he walked the walk… (FY2 to senior clinical product role in under four years). Pigeon readers get 25% off with the code SOMX.

Events 📅

Hash It Out: Real-World Innovation Implementation (Hale House)
📅 Tuesday 23rd June, 17:30
🇬🇧 Hale House, 76 Portland Place,
London Hale House’s community evening on what it actually takes to move healthtech from pilot to adoption. Going fast on tickets and free. The Hale House crowd is exactly who you want to spend an evening with if you’re building anything that has to land inside the NHS.

HIMSS AI Leadership Summit + AI in Healthcare Forum
📅 24 June (Summit) and 25–26 June (Forum)
🇺🇸 Renaissance Boston Seaport District, Boston
The Summit is an invite-only gathering of 65 senior healthcare executives working through AI governance, implementation, and risk in one room, no keynote theatre, just structured roundtables and a private dinner. The Forum that follows across 25-26 June is open to all healthcare professionals and goes deep on real-world AI application across clinical, operational, and enterprise domains.

Healthtech Integrates 2026
📅 1 July
🇬🇧 London
An in-person event in London focusing on healthcare technology innovations and networking opportunities.

Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup for everything else.

Jobs for humans🕵️‍♀️

🔌 Technical Product Manager, Integration, Heidi - Heidi doesn’t need much of an intro. This role owns the integration layer that makes all of it actually talk to Epic, Cerner, Athena and the rest without forcing a single clinician to think about FHIR. If you understand why EMR write-back is where good healthtech goes to die, and you'd rather build a framework than firefight bespoke connectors for three regions at once, this is the job worth having.

💞 Head of Growth, Hertility - Hertility’s at-home hormone and fertility testing has cut the wait for some diagnoses from nine years to six days, and now they want a growth leader to own the entire DTC engine across testing, clinical services, subscriptions and the app. Move quickly though, applications close Friday 19th June.

🧮 Head of Data ,Semble - Fresh off that £30m payday, they’re hiring someone to own data strategy. Real scale, genuinely messy real-world clinical data, and a company with the funding to actually do something with it. Expect a bit of competition for this one. If you do get an interview. Check out my podcast episode with Christoph, the co-founder and CEO.

📣 Want something in front of our 7,500+ readers?

You can break your news as the main story, feature a podcast, job or event... and we even have a few sponsorship packages to choose from...

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Feature a job, podcast, event

Sponsor Pigeon

We review everything editorially - if it is not right for our audience, we’ll let you know. Everything has to be valuable to this glorious community.

See you next week, Pigeon fans ✌🏼

Healthtech Pigeon is produced by SomX - the media-led communications and creative agency for healthcare. We help healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector organisations tell sharper stories through strategy, PR, content, design, events and media production. Built by clinicians, scientists and creatives who know the space. Work with us.

Thanks for reading Healthtech Pigeon 🐦! If you like what you see and you’ve not already, go ahead and subscribe 👉

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📖 Learn more about the SomX team at https://somx.health

Hi friends, me again. Guess what? Another big week in healthtech. An online NHS Trust with a bloke from Tesco in charge, Microsoft and the Mayo did a thing, Korea and the US did a thing, and some founders just did a Series E and probably laughed as they spent the number in your pitch deck on lunch. (That’s a joke, they’re probably very nice people with a fantastic legal team).

News Bites 🥪

📱 England's first new NHS trust in over a decade is, essentially, a website: What a start… the PM trailed it last September and we’re now official… the Online NHS Trust exists, with former Tesco and Apple retail boss John Browett in the chair. There are 8.5 million virtual appointments over three years for the likes of menopause, recurring UTIs and iron deficiency anaemia, all routed through the NHS App once your GP refers you. Sensible enough. On the board you’ve also got Neko Health's Global Medical Director Nikki Kanani, plus an ex-LoveFilm and graze.com founder and a clutch of consumer-tech NEDs. Reads more Silicon Roundabout than Stevenage General, but hey, call me a sellout if you want, but we complain enough about stagnant thinking, bureaucracy, waiting times and all the rest of it… Some people with a north star pointing towards customer service might be absolutely ideal. Why not?
<Awaits multiple reasons in the comments, but I’m here for it>

🩺 26 women’s health technologies are now heading toward NHS pilots: The Ripple Women’s Digital Health Challenge, delivered through Cogniss, the Health Innovation Network, and Amazon Web Services, used to support 2 innovations. Now it’s 26 and they’re all patient-facing digital tools for underserved areas of women’s health. Some epic companies in here like MenoSaathi (menopause support for South Asian women), Jalititi (multilingual breast health for Black women), and Gracefully (bereavement support for maternity staff). Several are now in pilot discussions with NHS orgs and they plan to create a women’s health portfolio for NHS organisations to evaluate and procure collectively. Excellent.

🤖 Microsoft and Mayo Clinic announced a frontier AI model for healthcare: Announced at Microsoft Build on Tuesday (and a lot on Linkedin ever since then), Mustafa Suleyman’s Microsoft AI now hooks up with Mayo Clinic’s longitudinal dataset of over 60 billion medical records from 320 million patients. The model’s going to be be owned by Mayo, distributed via Azure Foundry APIs, and it’s described as supporting “the broadest scope of clinical reasoning.” Things not mentioned (hence we’re quite unsure of): benchmarks, pricing, regulatory status, peer-reviewed evidence and external release timeline. Once I hear about some of those, I’ll allow myself to get more hyped. Until then, I’ll keep checking Linkedin. Sounds cool though.

🧪 Seoul National University Hospital and Harvard built a virtual hospital to test medical AI before it touches real patients: SNUH and Harvard Medical School have created the Clinical Environment Simulator, which unfortunately isn’t a gamified VR version of medical school, but fortunately is a framework for testing LLM-based medical AI in a realistic simulated environment before deployment. It uses a Patient Engine that generates virtual symptom trajectories based on specialist-defined disease templates and real EMR data, and a Hospital Engine that replicates real workflow conditions including bed status, staff availability, and resource allocation. You can trigger crisis scenarios and the AI’s timing decisions affect patient outcomes in the simulation before anyone uses it in the real world. Would be very cool to see them create a live leaderboard of how all the LLMs are doing (like the above).

💰 Garner Health closes $100M Series E at $2.74 billion, twice its valuation from three months ago: US care navigation startup Garner Health has raised $100m in a Series E led by Index Ventures, with Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Founders Fund, and Kaiser Permanente Ventures alongside (what a list, by the way). The model uses over 60 billion medical records to score physicians on clinical quality, then financially incentivise employers and employees to choose better-rated doctors. Went from a $1.35B valuation in February to $2.74B now. So to be clear, in the time they created $1.4bn in value, I haven’t even cleared my notifications.

🗂️ Novellia raises $18M to let patients own and sell their own health data to pharma: This has been coming and I think it’s a great direction for patient data ownership… New York-based Novellia has raised an $18m Series A for a platform that lets patients aggregate up to 20 years of medical records across multiple providers and choose to share anonymised data with pharmaceutical companies for research. Currently, brokers build research datasets from insurance claims and hospital records without any patient involvement or payment, so people are making bank on your info, which has always seemed unfair. This changes that. Top-10 pharma companies are already customers. Can enough patients be motivated to share to get to critical mass? Will pharma pay enough for consented data versus scraped data? Interesting.

🔒 HSSIB warns NHS trusts are managing digital safety risks from ePMA systems largely alone: ePMA software (the electronic systems hospitals use to prescribe and administer drugs) is meant to reduce medication errors, and a lot of the time it does. But everyone’s favourite branch, The Healthcare Safety Investigation Response Branch, has published a report saying there are no core national safety standards for how these systems are designed or procured, which leaves wide variation between trusts and real confusion about whether it's the CQC or the MHRA who's supposed to be watching. The good news is the report names the gap clearly and lays out exactly how to close it, and with the single patient record on its way, there's never been a better moment to build this in from the ground up.

Pigeon insider is the upgraded newsletter for those of you that want deep research, analysis and to steal the ideas to sound incredibly smart in front of everyone else.

This week’s edition looks at two separate ultrasound AI companies that I recently had on The Healthtech Podcast. The founders are from completely different backgrounds, but both companies have great traction, great tech, regulatory approval and could each be generationally important.

For investors, founders and buyers, this one has everything about the ultrasound AI market that you need to know.

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What to listen to 🔊

This week I sat down with Dr Tom Chambers, anaesthetist and Co-founder and CMO of Theta Sleep, to unpack why 9.2 million people in the UK are living with undiagnosed sleep apnoea, why CPAP has an image problem, and how shifting diagnosis and treatment into the home could fix a supply-and-demand crisis the NHS isn't built to solve.

With NHS Online now formally established, this documentary-style episode from Digital Health's Tammy Lovell and Jordan Sollof is essential context. Starts with a 70-something widow in the Midlands who feels locked out of an increasingly digital system. Required listening before getting too enthusiastic about NHS Online.

Russ Branzell, CEO of CHIME, and Anupama Ambe of Kyndryl on how health systems are actually approaching modernisation right now: AI adoption, hybrid cloud, cyber resilience, and the operational pressures that make all of it harder than the brochure suggests. Ambe brings 25 years of transformation experience and is usefully blunt about what works.

Resources 📚

🧭 Curious about a move into healthtech?: For any clinicians weighing up a career in healthtech, Dr Yath Prem has written a whopping 105 pages covering how the ecosystem works, translating clinical experience into business language, CVs, interviews, salary and equity, and 50 UK companies to follow. And he walked the walk… (FY2 to senior clinical product role in under four years). Pigeon readers get 25% off with the code SOMX.

Events 📅

🇬🇧 London Tech Week 2026
📅 8–12 June 2026
🇬🇧 Olympia London
The big one for the wider UK tech ecosystem. Healthtech track expanding year-on-year.

🤝 Health & Tech Collective X London Tech Week Super Connector
📅 9 June 2026
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
For the third year running, some of the biggest names in UK healthtech, from Coulter Partners to HSBC Innovation Banking, Google and Thena Capital, are bringing Super Connector back for THE networking event of London Tech Week. The guest list reads like a who’s who in health innovation, so if you’d like to get in amongst it, DM Ian Coyne.

🏛️ NHS Confed Expo 2026
📅 10–11 June 2026
🇬🇧 Manchester Central
The UK’s biggest health and care leadership conference. 6,800+ attendees, 680+ speakers, NHS Confederation and NHS England both presenting their hands. Free for NHS, local authority and wider public sector staff. Pigeon will be there. Given the Palantir storm and the resignation cycle, expect the corridors to be busier than the agenda.

🎈 Hale House 1st Birthday Party + HLTH Europe Warmup
📅 11 June 2026
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
If you like cake, healthtech and also believe in unicorns, you should probably cancel any other plans for 11 June. Join the team to celebrate a whole year of Hale House, London’s home of healthtech, and to get in early on the HLTH Europe buzz for the following week, with a no-holds-barred fireside with one of the UK’s biggest names in Health journalism. A little bird also said there might even be a ticket to HLTH in the stakes too… but you’d have to head over to Portland Place to find out.

🐣 Hash It Out: Real-World Innovation Implementation (Hale House)
📅 Tuesday 23rd June, 17:30
🇬🇧 Hale House, 76 Portland Place,
London Hale House’s community evening on what it actually takes to move healthtech from pilot to adoption. Going fast on tickets and free. The Hale House crowd is exactly who you want to spend an evening with if you’re building anything that has to land inside the NHS.

HIMSS AI Leadership Summit + AI in Healthcare Forum
📅 24 June (Summit) and 25–26 June (Forum)
🇺🇸 Renaissance Boston Seaport District, Boston
The Summit is an invite-only gathering of 65 senior healthcare executives working through AI governance, implementation, and risk in one room, no keynote theatre, just structured roundtables and a private dinner. The Forum that follows across 25–26 June is open to all healthcare professionals and goes deep on real-world AI application across clinical, operational, and enterprise domains.

Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup for everything else.

Jobs for humans🕵️‍♀️

🏛️ Group Chief Digital Officer, Barts Health NHS Trust (London). One of the largest NHS trusts in the country wants its most senior digital leader… five hospitals, a major ICS role across North East London, and accountability for EPR, cyber, data and the full technology portfolio. If you want to run digital transformation at NHS scale rather than advise on it from the outside, this is the job.

🧬 Clinician Scientist, Pangaea Data (London / San Francisco, hybrid). Imperial-rooted AI startup, backed by Lord David Prior and former Novartis CIO, building clinical reasoning tools that find undiagnosed and undertreated patients at the point of care. A genuine clinical brain role working directly with clinicians and pharma clients on AI that actually reaches patients.

💙 Clinical Product Manager, Healthtech-1 (London). The team automating GP practice admin (new patient registrations, lab report processing, the mundane work that consumes 35% of NHS staff time) want a clinical PM to help build the parts of the patient journey that come next.

🔬 Medical Device Quality Engineer, Scarlet (London). Scarlet is the AI medical device certification company trying to make regulatory approval fast enough to not strangle innovation. If you know your way around ISO 13485 and EU MDR and the idea of auditing the most ambitious medical AI companies in the world sounds interesting rather than terrifying, they want to hear from you.

💬 Implementation Manager, Primary Care, Accurx (London, with practice travel). Accurx is in 98% of GP practices and the Implementation Manager role is the thing that makes adoption actually stick: onboarding new users, building relationships across practices, and feeding what you learn back into the product. For anyone with a primary care or NHS operations background who wants to see the NHS work better in a way they can directly point to.

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Healthtech Pigeon is produced by SomX - the media-led communications and creative agency for healthcare. We help healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector organisations tell sharper stories through strategy, PR, content, design, events and media production. Built by clinicians, scientists and creatives who know the space. Work with us.

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I recently recorded two podcasts (a few weeks apart) with founders of ultrasound AI companies, both driven by personal stories and really tough lived experiences.

They were also both convinced that the obstetric ultrasound, the grainy black-and-white image nearly every pregnant woman in the country lies down for, holds far more than we currently pull out of it. One of them has spent thirty-five years inside paediatric medicine and the other had never read an ultrasound in his life.

Yet they arrived at the same fundamental belief from opposite ends of the earth, and that convergence is fascinating. Each could see something the other structurally couldn’t and the field is much richer for having both of them leaning over the same image, asking very different, very valid questions.

I’ve written this one around the idea that insiders often say to outsiders with a bold vision… “If it were possible, we’d already be doing it.” That might be the most expensive sentence in medicine, I’ve heard it a lot in my career, and I want to work out what it protects, and what it costs.

Read more

Hi friends, big week for ‘roided up superhumans at the Enhanced Games in Vegas, Apple’s the next company that now wants data from your wrist, but hey, good news - a couple of startups actually raised money 💰

News Bites 🥪

🏛️ The NHS Modernisation Bill = NHS England is on its way out: Another restructure. Excellent. Before he sacked himself, Wes put in a bill that kicked off with abolishing NHS England and folding it back into DHSC, then greenlit the long-promised Single Patient Record and abolished Healthwatch (FYI, whose tagline is “we make sure NHS and social care decision-makers hear your voice and use your feedback to improve care”). I mention it because the 2nd reading is tomorrow (Monday 1 June). If you enjoy watching as your NHSE contract gets lit on fire, or want to be the first to run the transcript through Claude to get a Linkedin post on it for those life-changing likes from strangers, go to parliament.tv at 3pm.

🏃 The Enhanced Games are real, and they’re equal parts entertaining and concerning: Weird one, this. Chatted about it on this week’s Pigeon podcast with Dr Tomasz George, who has a PhD in longevity. Athletes openly using performance-enhancing drugs, compete, and it’s broadcast as entertainment. The cynical might call it a modern colosseum as 2026 ‘gladiators' fight their own insecurities to death. The credulous might draw a line from athletes’ learning whilst optimising human performance.* A pre-event University of Birmingham study found 91% of competitors had used testosterone, 79% HGH, 62% stimulants, which isn’t exactly bleeding edge longevity science, but they are enhancements. Look, it’s adjacent to healthtech (longevity bros, biohacking, “performance optimisation” all share the same Venn diagram), and it’s a stress-test for what “consumer health” looks like when you remove the safety guardrails (kind of), but only 1 world record’s been broken at the time of writing so far, though, which is a bit disappointing / embarrassing.** Then again, do we really want someone jacked up so hard they break the sound barrier just to see how many years that took off their life?

🤖 1 in 7 Brits would rather ask ChatGPT than see a GP: The traction on this narrative keeps building. It deserves attention and we should take it to heart and build a system with it in mind. This time, a KCL/Focaldata poll of 2,083 adults found 15% have used an AI chatbot in place of a GP visit and 21% have decided against seeing a clinician based on chatbot advice. Lead author Prof Graham Lord isn’t celebrating. Remember, this is a poll, not a peer-reviewed paper, and we like our academic integrity here at Pigeon, so caveats do apply. But the direction of travel is obvious in that patients are already triaging themselves with LLMs, while the regulatory and clinical-safety frameworks are still on chapter one of the user manual. The NHS App’s AI features can’t ship fast enough.

👂 TympaHealth grabs £2m to keep peering into ears: Fellow Mauritian, Dr Krishan Ramdoo’s hearing-health platform has secured a £2m Innovate UK loan to scale Tympa Assist, the AI otoscopy tool used across the world. I first met Krish a long time ago, and even since then it’s been clear that Tympa is one of the genuinely useful “tech-enabled task-shifting” stories, moving ear care out of overstretched ENT clinics and into pharmacies and primary care. Frankly, I have a soft spot for those fixing a workflow problem rather than promising to reinvent medicine via API. Worth watching whether Innovate UK loans (vs equity) become a more common funding route for clinically-validated UK healthtech. We’re in dire need of a model between ‘spend your own money’ and ‘here, take this briefcase, but make sure you become the biggest company on earth or else 🫵🏼.’***

🩸 The $20m preventative health app setting a new European standard: Paris-based, Lucis, has raised a $20m Series A (led by Singular, with General Catalyst and Y-Combinator along for the ride), just four months after an $8m seed. They look at 110+ of your blood biomarkers, have an AI companion app, built in physician oversight, and claim a mission to make prevention "the default, rather than a privilege." The early data’s interesting, 99.9% of users had at least one biomarker outside optimal ranges, and 75% of six-month returners improved at least three markers without medication. At £399/yr, realistically, we have a long way to go before prevention is for the unprivileged (see part 1 and part 2 of my prevention deep dive for Pigeon Insider). But, with the likes of Lucis, Neko and others competing in this area, tech will advance, prices should come down and access should go up. The tipping point will be longitudinal data pointing to economic payback for one of these services at national scale, then real questions start emerging…

🩻 NHS SBS launches a £900m AI procurement framework: Not the Special Boat Service unfortunately (the NHS would be infinitely cooler, and you’d probably assume infinitely more effective, with an armed special forces unit persuading people to increase their tech adoption), alas, no, this is the Shared Business Services. Anyway, the new Healthcare AI Solutions framework is the biggest single AI procurement vehicle the NHS has put on the table. Critics say the structure and supplier qualification thresholds favour incumbents over the startups (try to look surprised). Good thing? Bad thing? Either way, if you’re a clinical AI vendor with UK ambitions, take a read.

And finally…

🍎 Apple Watch might be about to get a proper FDA-cleared BP feature: Given big tech’s obsession with getting our bodily data, it’s no surprise that Apple are reportedly submitting a direct BP measurement capability for FDA review, with the Watch Ultra 4 the leading candidate. I worked in ITU, so my bar for BP accuracy is pretty high and I’ve seen plenty of startups trying this for years (the validation papers are very mixed). But if Apple actually clears the FDA bar on cuffless BP at scale, you might say that’s a meaningful shift in the home-monitoring landscape and it might be a problem for every standalone BP device company. Distribution is most of the game these days in that weird grey area of B2C health/wellness/wearables/longevity stuff. Would be a win for patients in the community though, where accurate, more continuous BP readings provide insights that genuinely keep them healthier.

Good news (literally). Pigeon Insider has launched.

Pigeon Insider is the long-form upgrade to this lovely newsletter. It’s your way of supporting this one whilst getting some superb (if we do say so) deep research, analysis and views.

The latest edition has everything you need to know about clinically safe and valid mental health AI - the history, the technical architecture, what happens when it goes wrong and, actually, why my thoughts around them were completely wrong.

It was released on Thursday. The back catalogue is available once you sign up.

If you want to sound smart at your next board meeting, investor committee or family gathering… subscribe below. You’ll make the fee back via your inevitable, immediate promotion and pay rise.

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What to listen to 🔊

This week I'm joined by Dr Sujitha Selvarajah, co-founder of Hesta Health, who closed a £2M pre-seed round to rebuild postnatal care from the ground up. We get into why most of the women's health gap has nothing to do with reproductive health, why new mothers are abandoned at the moment their care needs spike, and what it actually takes to build healthcare that's both clinically excellent and humane.

Host Jordan Sollof is joined by Alcidion's UK MD/CMO Paul Deffley and CCIO Tracy McClelland to dig into patient flow and why it's the unglamorous bit of NHS operations that quietly determines whether everything else works. They walk through a live example fand unpack the key findings of the Public Policy Projects report on bed management and flow.

Clinical AI only helps patients if clinicians and health systems trust it. Seth Hain, Epic's Senior VP of R&D, makes the case for building foundation models that respect institutional autonomy, minimise burden, and prioritise safety.

Events 📅

🌆 SXSW London 2026
📅 1–6 June 2026
🇬🇧 London
Music, film, tech, culture, and a notably healthier health-tech track than the Austin original tends to feature.

🏗️ Pathfinder Digital Transformation Summit
📅 2 June 2026
🇬🇧 88 Wood Street
London Pathfinder’s CIC summit pulling NHS digital leaders, vendors and policy folk together.

🌍 Global Ambitions Forum: ABHI International at Hale House
📅 3 June, 12:00-17:00
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
ABHI’s Middle East and US Accelerator alumni in one room with the wider UK health innovation ecosystem: Suzie Ali-Hassan, Stephen Williams (Intersurgical), Nick De-Pennington (Ufonia), David Porter (Apposite Capital). If you’re thinking about international expansion and want practical operating guidance rather than another panel about “global ambition,” this is the one.

🇬🇧 London Tech Week 2026
📅 8–12 June 2026
🇬🇧 Olympia London
The big one for the wider UK tech ecosystem. Healthtech track expanding year-on-year.

🤝 Health & Tech Collective X London Tech Week Super Connector
📅 9 June 2026
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
For the third year running, some of the biggest names in UK healthtech, from Coulter Partners to HSBC Innovation Banking, Google and Thena Capital, are bringing Super Connector back for THE networking event of London Tech Week. The guest list reads like a who’s who in health innovation, so if you’d like to get in amongst it, DM Ian Coyne.

🏛️ NHS Confed Expo 2026
📅 10–11 June 2026
🇬🇧 Manchester Central
The UK’s biggest health and care leadership conference. 6,800+ attendees, 680+ speakers, NHS Confederation and NHS England both presenting their hands. Free for NHS, local authority and wider public sector staff. Pigeon will be there. Given the Palantir storm and the resignation cycle, expect the corridors to be busier than the agenda.

🎈 Hale House 1st Birthday Party + HLTH Europe Warmup
📅 11 June 2026
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
If you like cake, healthtech and also believe in unicorns, you should probably cancel any other plans for 11 June. Join the team to celebrate a whole year of Hale House, London’s home of healthtech, and to get in early on the HLTH Europe buzz for the following week, with a no-holds-barred fireside with one of the UK’s biggest names in Health journalism. A little bird also said there might even be a ticket to HLTH in the stakes too… but you’d have to head over to Portland Place to find out.

🐣 Hash It Out: Real-World Innovation Implementation (Hale House)
📅 Tuesday 23rd June, 17:30
🇬🇧 Hale House, 76 Portland Place,
London Hale House’s community evening on what it actually takes to move healthtech from pilot to adoption. Going fast on tickets and free. The Hale House crowd is exactly who you want to spend an evening with if you’re building anything that has to land inside the NHS.

Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup for everything else.

Jobs for humans🕵️‍♀️

🧬 Clinical Director, Metabolic Health, Ōura (hybrid, London). The $11bn smart ring people want an endocrinology/metabolic-medicine clinician with SaMD experience to own the medical strategy as they push deeper into chronic disease. Genuinely rare role: clinical depth plus consumer hardware reach.

🧠 Senior Product Manager, Limbic (London). Limbic now reaches 15%+ of NHS talking-therapies providers, and they’re hiring a PM to own the next phase of the clinical assistant. If you want to ship product into the NHS at actual scale, this is one of the few places doing it.

🩺 Clinical Lead (GP), Accurx (London). Pigeon has lost count of how many GP practices use Accurx. They’re after a practising GP to keep the clinical thinking close to the product. Two days a week clinical, three days shaping the tool you probably already use.

💻 Senior Software Engineer (Frontend), Neko Health (London). Daniel Ek’s preventative scanning empire is hiring across the engineering org as they scale their London and Manchester clinics. React/TypeScript stack, doctor-facing and member-facing apps. If your LinkedIn feed has been increasingly Neko-shaped lately, this is why.

🧪 Multiple roles, Lindus Health (London Bridge). The “anti-CRO” raised a $55m Series B and is hiring across commercial, clinical operations, product and engineering. If you’ve ever rolled your eyes at how clinical trials are run and thought “surely this can be better,” they agree.

📣 Want something in front of our 7,500+ readers?

You can break your news as the main story, feature a podcast, job or event... and we even have a few sponsorship packages to choose from...

Break your news

Feature a job, podcast, event

Sponsor Pigeon

We review everything editorially - if it is not right for our audience, we’ll let you know. Everything has to be valuable to this glorious community.

See you next week, Pigeon fans ✌🏼

* I’m on fire with the vocabulary today

** Even that was down to the banned-at-regular-events-swimming-suit which gives you an extreme hydrodynamic edge.

*** Not the best description of venture capital, but you get the point

Healthtech Pigeon is produced by SomX - the media-led communications and creative agency for healthcare. We help healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector organisations tell sharper stories through strategy, PR, content, design, events and media production. Built by clinicians, scientists and creatives who know the space. Work with us.

Thanks for reading Healthtech Pigeon 🐦! If you like what you see and you’ve not already, go ahead and subscribe 👉

Subscribe now