Hi team,
James is having a week off, so I’m up, and it’s been a week all about the money, money, money, with Heidi raising $340M, Oura going public, and UK AI call handler InTouchNow announcing its seed round. And Down Under, it turns out an OpenAI agent wandered into the Medicare system back in June, but the government only just found out. Oops…
Until next time,
Jessica 🫶🏼
News Bites 🥪
💸 Heidi Health lands $340M at a $900M valuation: Last week, Scandinavian scribe Tandem announced its $100m Series B, so, naturally, this week, the Australian scribe Heidi stood up and said, I raise you a $340M Series C, literally. Just shy of unicorn status, Blackbird led $100m in venture funding, with LocalGlobe’s Phoenix Court, Point72 and Headline following on, plus a further $240m in non-dilutive growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund. Since GC will be taking a capped slice of revenue rather than equity, it’s an interesting indicator of just how much confidence the funders have in the company. One thing is certain, the ambient scribe race is well and truly on.
🚨 Australia launches urgent review after an OpenAI agent breaches a government health portal: Staying in Australia, an autonomous OpenAI agent got into the statistics portal of Medicare, the country’s universal health insurance scheme. It turns out the breach happened in June. OpenAI found out in August, but the Government only found out in September when OpenAI dropped an email into a general government inbox that only gets checked once a day. Coooolllllll. And comes in the same week Sam Altman called for international AI standards… You’d think a company of that size that is spending a decent whack on public affairs and government relations would have SOMEONE with a direct line to a minister. Alas, a sporadically checked inbox was the channel of preference… makes sense… Anyway, Australia has now launched a review of its AI laws and governance.
🔐 Palantir’s Federated Data Platform takes in GP records for the first time: The FDP saga boils on, and this week it was confirmed that five GP practices in Cheshire and Merseyside now feed pseudonymised data into the FDP through a third party to help the ICB understand and manage the health needs of its patient population, which an internal NHS note called “a significant milestone”, and in principle maybe that’s right. However, back in 2023 ministers told Parliament that GP data would not form part of the national platform, and yet now in five practices it does, without any discourse about the change in strategy or, critically, on patient consent. Particularly awks when 60,000 people voted with their feet between May and July, choosing to use the national data opt-out to block access to their records. Who knows what the FDP will bring in the next week, but maybe Andy and Yvette are saving the big announcement for Labour Party conference. We can but hope.
☎️ VCs back InTouchNow’s AI voice agents for the NHS: We all know getting through to a GP practice at 8am on a Tuesday morning to book an appointment takes more planning and strategy than securing four tickets for Glastonbury. InTouchNow, an AI call handling company for NHS GP practices, has raised a £2.3M seed round led by Ada Ventures, supported by Exceptional Ventures and Kadmos Capital. But AI bias is real, and voice AI and AI receptionists have understandably come under heat for failing to understand accents and languages. Live in 150+ practices already, InTouchNow is backing itself to fix that with over 200 regional accents and over 80 different languages that are automatically detected when someone starts speaking; if they can solve it, Drake won’t be the only one with hotline bling.
💍 Oura launches its IPO, seeking up to $2.2bn on Nasdaq: The rumours were true and Oura is heading to Nasdaq, with 50 million shares priced at $40 to $44 for a raise of up to $2.2bn. Existing shareholders are selling 36.5 million of those shares, so only the remaining 13.5 million new shares raise money for the company, about $533m in total. Of that, $526m goes straight to paying the tax bill on behalf of employees cashing in their shares, which leaves the company with roughly $7m, or about 0.3% of the headline number. Oura does have another 7.5 million shares (around $300m) held back in case demand runs hot, so perhaps that’s what it’s banking on. Either way, Oura has got down on one knee in front of Wall Street, so fingers crossed for them that the market says yes.
🧪 Novo Nordisk partners with Anthropic on AI drug discovery: Five months after getting cosy with OpenAI, Novo Nordisk has decided it’s in the market for an LLM-thruple, and invited Anthropic into the relationship. It will test Claude Science across its R&D workflows and use Anthropic’s models for internal software development, and suddenly two platforms with two very different use cases start to make sense. Plenty of others in pharma have moved out of the talking phase to partner up too, with Merck committing up to $1bn to Google Cloud and Eli Lilly collabing with Nvidia for a drug discovery lab. The numbers behind these relationships are pretty chunky, but the jury is still out on how much R&D money they actually save. I guess we’ll keep watching to see which of these couples (or thruples) are still together by the time a drug actually reaches Phase III.
🎗️ Young Lives vs Cancer partners with Ditto to help parents of children with cancer: The world is going wild for clinical scribes, which is potentially great for healthcare professionals, but what about patients? Ditto has built the patient answer to ambient scribing with its free app for patients and their families to help capture and share the conversation and information from consultations with wider family and friends, to alleviate the burden of answering multiple well-meaning questions every day, and to provide them with their own record of the care journey. I hope and pray I never have to use the app under these circumstances, but as a parent of a ‘lively’ almost-two-year-old, I can definitely see the use case for the ad hoc trips to the GP and, dare I say it, Urgent Care. And if you’re interested in finding out what it means to build a truly patient-centred solution, listen back to our chat with Patient Advocacy G.O.A.T. expert Mark Duman on Healthtech Pigeon.
What to Listen to 🔊
Keeping one eye on the Novo / Anthropic / OpenAI thruple, this pod from TED Health explains why Alzheimer’s and cancer stay stubbornly unsolved while compute keeps getting better.
Over on The Healthtech Podcast, James spoke to We Don’t Consult’s Ross Drynan, who explains why clinical founders tend to fail at selling rather than building, why we ought to lean into vibe coding for cheap validation and argues you should sell with a diagnostic rather than a demo 👀
Events 📅
LSI Europe ‘26 Emerging Medtech Summit
🗓️ 28 September-1 October
📍 🇪🇸 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.
HETT Show 2026
🗓️ 29-30 September
📍 🇬🇧 ExCeL London.
The big one for UK digital health, two days of NHS trusts, vendors and policy folk all in one hall. If you only make it to one healthtech show this autumn, this is probably still the one, and after this week’s MHRA report expect every stand to have “AI governance” bolted onto its pitch.
Women’s Health Week Europe 2026
🗓️ 7-8 October
📍 🇬🇧 Emirates Stadium, London.
Given the week we’ve just had, with Evvy, Lilly and a wave of women’s health cash all landing in the same seven days, this one couldn’t be better timed. Two days dedicated entirely to a sector that keeps getting told it’s “finally having a moment.”
HTN Health Tech Awards 2026
🗓️ 7 October
📍 💻 Online.
UK digital health’s own awards night, celebrating the trusts and vendors actually shipping things rather than just talking about them.
Hash It Out: Uncharted territory - Entering new markets
🗓️ 13 October
📍 🇬🇧 Hale House, London.
The latest Hash It Out session at Hale House brings together innovators and experts to explore how to figure out which new market to head to next.
TechBio UK 2026
🗓️ 13 October
📍 🇬🇧 Kings Place, London.
A day on the collision of biology and technology, aimed at founders and investors betting that AI genuinely changes how drugs and diagnostics get built.
Transforming the NHS 2026
🗓️ 20 October
📍 🇬🇧 One Great George Street, London.
The MHRA just handed the sector 44 new things to think about, so a conference specifically about transforming the NHS has never felt more on the nose. Expect a lot of panels quietly rewriting their slides this week.
Frontiers Health 2026
🗓️ 20-21 October
📍 🇩🇪 Berlin.
Europe’s big digital health innovation gathering, mixing pharma, payers and start-ups in a way that’s more useful than it sounds.
BMJ Future Health Europe 2026
🗓️ 29-30 October
📍 🇬🇧 The Brewery, London.
The BMJ’s own take on where health tech is heading, heavier on evidence and policy than most vendor-run conferences.
AI in Health Summit 2026
🗓️ 4 November
📍 🇬🇧 Royal College of Physicians, London.
A day entirely on AI in healthcare, which after this week should have plenty to talk about.
Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup for everything else.
Opportunities 🕵️♀️
🚀 Forward Faster Accelerator, Cohort 2 FFinc is looking for 100 female-founded UK businesses for a six-month programme running October to April. Apply so they can find you! Deadline extended to 2 October.
🦘Finance Manager, Heidi (London). A good time to join Heidi if you fancy looking after $340m of new investment. They’re predictably hiring across the board, so if finance isn’t your thing but Heidi is, there’s a good chance they’re recruiting for a role that's up your street.
🩻 GPs, Nurses and HCAs, Neko Health (London). NYC has launched, and UK bases keep expanding so the Neko team are looking for clinicians to help run their preventive scans and keep the wheels well oiled.
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