#266 Funding has a certain ring to it 💍

The one-minute healthtech roundup, brought to you by SomX.

SomX

Dr James Somauroo

, and

Dr Grace Hatton

Oct 19, 2025

Hi friends,

This week we saw a certain wearable get a bumper valuation upgrade, there’s bags of money all over the place for healthtech companies, and even the best of the best get caught using ChatGPT... Except us—obviously.*

This week: Listen to SomX’s OG Belle and rookie, Harry, chatting through this week’s stories on the Healthtech Pigeon podcast ⬇️

And it’s on YouTube. We’re modern like that.

News Bites 🥪

💍 Oura hits $11bn valuation after $900m Series E: The Finnish health tech startup known for its fancy-looking smart rings has raised over $900m in a new funding round, pushing its total valuation to a very neat $11bn. Also interesting to note that Oura’s chief commercial officer has vocalised that it’s focusing more on winning young women and losing gym rats, and is fine with that. Sorry, gym bros: Guess there’s always Whoop?

📊 Deloitte issues refund for error-ridden Australian government report that used AI: Egg on face for Deloitte this past week, who said they’ll give a partial refund to the Australian federal government after admitting to use of GenAI to help produce a $440,000 report that contained a heck of a lot of errors (I mean, what even happened to proofreading? What even happened to proofreading? What even happened to proofreading? Ok, we get it - Ed). So, next time you’re looking for a healthtech strategy, consider upgrading your AI before handing buckets of cash to the Big 4. Or… hear me out… paying a human who knows things.

💼 Infosys awarded £1.2 billion contract for future NHS workforce platform: Consulting and digital services company Infosys has been handed an NHS contract valued at £1.2 billion with the aim of delivering an enhanced workforce solution in line with the UK government’s 10-year health plan. The tech giant has also shared plans to use AI tools in order to help streamline workforce planning: Let’s hope they don’t run into the same problems that Deloitte have with this approach ^.

💰 €30M committed to healthtech fund to accelerate global innovation: Spex Capital, an early-stage investor tackling global healthcare challenges through innovative tech solutions, has announced the first of its funds to help entrepreneurs along the way as part of a larger flagship €100 million global Venture Healthtech Fund. Budding companies in the Series A/B weeds, this one’s for you 👀

🩺 [Study] AI-based screening system leverages home-videos to improve early autism diagnosis: Diagnosing autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is resource-intensive, reliant on trained professionals, suffers from observer bias, is time-consuming, and limited in accessibility due to high cost and the need for specialised training. Enter AI (the old skool stuff… machine learning… that we talked about before LLMs - it’s still going apparently), which extracted behavioural features automatically from 510 children in South Korea using home-videos. Results were promising, not perfect, but you can see where this is going. Huge potential to increase diagnostic resource.

🧠 Lyra launches ‘clinical-grade’ chatbot amid growing concern about mental health and AI: Mental health provider Lyra Health has launched one of the first large-scale generative AI tools aimed to integrate directly into ongoing therapy, placing them slightly ahead of many smaller startups already experimenting with AI-driven therapy support. However, given the aforementioned Deloitte mishap, Pigeon can’t help but question the important safety and trust questions these ventures raise, especially as evidence mounts around consumer chatbots’ unpredictable behaviour and psychological risks, and reinforcing how major players are attempting to balance innovation with clinical oversight in one of healthcare’s most sensitive domains (here here!).

And last but not least…

🤖 The world is just not quite ready for humanoids yet: Technophobes can breathe a temporary sigh of relief as a recent essay by iRobot founder Rodney Brooks has called out the problem with pouring billions of dollars into humanoid robot companies: The bots just won’t be able to learn dexterity, so (he argues, don’t shoot the messenger pigeon here) rendering them essentially useless 🫠