NEX Health Intelligence secures €1M to anticipate drug-resistant infection outbreak sites in hospitals
Artificial intelligence is being deployed to predict where drug-resistant infections will spread next inside hospitals, as London-based medtech start-up NEX Health Intelligence secures fresh funding to bring its technology through UK regulatory certification.
Funding and investors
The company, founded in 2020 by Dr Ashleigh Myall and Dr Chang Ho Yoon, has raised €1 million in a pre-seed round led by Brighteye Ventures, a European venture capital firm that typically backs early-stage technology companies with investments between €0.4 million and €4 million. The round also drew participation from AFI Ventures, Adeline Arts & Science, Momentous Ventures and the Conception X Angel Syndicate. The new injection brings NEX Health Intelligence’s total funding to €1.2 million. The business, which currently employs seven people, has its registered office in Bolton, England, and lists software development, IT services and biotechnology research and development among its activities.
How the AI predicts infection spread
NEX Health Intelligence’s platform functions as an “intelligence platform for system-wide infection prevention,” designed to move beyond the reactive tracking of past outbreaks. Instead of simply recording where infections have already occurred, the system analyses a combination of live hospital data — including microbiology records, bed movement logs, patient contact histories and diagnostic results — to generate a real-time infection risk map for each hospital ward.
The AI then identifies which patients are at heightened risk of contracting a drug-resistant infection and flags wards that require immediate intervention. The company describes its unique selling proposition as the ability to forecast where infections will go next, differentiating it from competitors such as ICNet, which was acquired by an American company roughly a decade ago and primarily tracks historical infection data.
NEX Health Intelligence has also explored using the same approach to predict viral infections and has conducted research into identifying outbreaks of antibiotic resistance by combining patient movement data with genomic information. The company has received an Innovate UK transformative technology grant to develop safe and transparent AI for infection surveillance.
Since launching its product in December 2025, the company claims an 114% increase in infection-control compliance among its users. It projects a “greater than 5x ROI” for hospitals that adopt the system, arguing it can both save costs and prevent infections.
Regulatory path and current deployments
A portion of the new funding has been earmarked to secure UK regulatory and clinical safety certification, including obtaining UK medical device certification. The UK’s regulatory framework for digital health technologies is evolving, with the Medical Device Regulation (MDR) now affecting how medical software is certified. The NHS AI Lab and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) have been offering support for AI research and innovation in health and care, although a clear tariff or reimbursement framework for digital health tools and AI in the UK has yet to be established.
NEX Health Intelligence’s platform is currently being tested at two NHS Trusts in London and has been deployed at a new site in the North West of England. Internationally, the system is running at a hospital in Southeast Asia and is expanding at one of Malaysia’s largest public hospitals.
The scale of the drug-resistant infection crisis
The technology targets a mounting public health threat. According to the World Health Organisation, one in ten hospital patients contracts a healthcare-associated infection. Globally, drug-resistant bacteria cause roughly 136 million hospital infections each year, and antimicrobial resistance could lead to as many as 39 million deaths over the next 25 years. In the European Union and European Economic Area alone, more than 35,000 people die annually from infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
England recorded an estimated 66,730 serious antibiotic-resistant infections in 2023, a figure that has surpassed pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels. Cases of bacteraemia — a life-threatening condition in which bacteria circulate in the blood — caused by antibiotic resistance rose by 9.3% between 2023 and 2024 in the UK, with nearly 400 new cases reported each week in 2024. In the United States, drug-resistant infections led to $1.9 billion in healthcare costs and more than 10,000 deaths among older adults in 2017. The economic costs of antimicrobial resistance are projected to exceed US$1 trillion in additional healthcare spending by 2050, with significant losses to global GDP.
Traditional methods of infection surveillance are often reactive, labour-intensive and costly, relying on delayed detection of signs, fragmented communication between clinical teams and a lack of digital tools for prevention. NEX Health Intelligence’s approach offers a potential shift from hindsight to foresight, though the company still needs to navigate the regulatory and reimbursement landscape before its system can be adopted more widely across the NHS.
