01Health’s $15M Bet to Move Specialist Care Into Local Clinics

UK healthtech company 01Health has raised $15 million in Series A funding to scale a specialist healthcare delivery platform that has, until now, lived almost entirely inside the company’s own dental brands. The round was led by Gresham House Ventures, with follow-on from Balderton Capital, Eka Ventures, and Wavemaker360, plus angel investors including Blockchain.com co-founder Nicolas Cary. The capital backs a UK rollout and a first push into the United States, but the more consequential shift sits one level below the headline: 01Health is opening the platform it has been quietly stress-testing inside a nationwide orthodontic network to outside clinics for the first time.

The company has run the platform as the back end for its own services since 2022, building a UK dental network around it and reaching the point where 90% of the UK population lives within 30 minutes of a clinic on the system. The Series A marks the moment that infrastructure stops being an internal tool and starts being sold. From here, practices, clinic groups, and dental service organisations can license the platform directly, with no requirement to be a 32Co or Aerox Health customer.

A Platform Built Inside 32Co’s Dental Network

01Health was founded in 2022 by Dr Sonia Szamocki, a former NHS doctor and former BCG consultant who set out to address what she describes as a long-running structural problem in UK care. Specialist treatment is concentrated in hospitals and major urban centres, while most community clinics lack the protocols, oversight, and workflows to offer more advanced services safely. Her answer was to build the missing layer in software, then prove it inside the company’s own clinical brands before showing it to anyone else.

The proving ground has been 32Co, the orthodontics arm, and Aerox Health, the dental sleep medicine provider. Through 32Co, the company has built one of the UK’s largest specialist dental networks, with 90% of the UK population living within 30 minutes of a 32Co dentist using the 01Health platform. Aerox Health runs on the same backbone, applying it to sleep apnoea and related conditions. Headcount has grown to more than 100 employees since launch, a sign of how much clinical and operational work has gone into turning a software platform into something a working dental practice can run on.

Access to specialist care is limited, expensive, and often inconvenient. I wanted to build technology that enables general clinicians – doctors and dentists – to deliver the kind of specialist care you’d usually only get in a hospital.

That framing, articulated by Szamocki on the founder’s case for the platform, is what the company is now asking the rest of the UK clinic market to buy into. The bet is that the same infrastructure which let a small group of dentists deliver specialist-grade orthodontics can be re-deployed in many other settings.

What the 01Health Platform Actually Does

The platform itself is a stack of five tightly integrated modules, designed to be deployed inside a third-party clinic without that clinic having to build the underlying specialist layer. The five components sit inside a single system that combines clinical oversight with patient-facing and back-office tooling, a structure that matters because the typical alternative, a patchwork of point solutions, has been the historical barrier for community clinics trying to offer specialist services.

The five modules are:

• Specialist oversight: remote specialist clinicians review cases and sign off on treatment plans, so a local practice is operating inside a defined clinical envelope.
• Clinical protocols: condition-specific treatment pathways, pre-built and updated centrally, so a clinic does not have to author specialist protocols from scratch.
• Patient communication tools: structured messaging and consent flows for the long, multi-visit journeys that specialist care tends to require.
• Operational workflows: scheduling, recall, and care-coordination plumbing that runs between local practice, specialist, and patient.
• AI-powered patient acquisition: demand generation and case-finding tools designed to feed specialist cases into the clinic, not just to fill general appointment slots.

The point of bundling all five is that they are interdependent. A local practice can adopt an AI-driven patient acquisition flow, but without protocols and remote oversight it cannot safely convert those leads into specialist cases. Reading the five modules as separate products misses how 01Health is selling them. In a market where another UK healthtech raise from earlier this year bet on medical data infrastructure, 01Health’s bet is on the operating layer for the clinic itself.

From Internal Tool to Standalone Product

Until now, the platform has been a private asset. It was used inside 32Co and Aerox Health, the company’s own brands, and the only way a third-party clinic interacted with it was by becoming a 32Co or Aerox customer. That changes with this round. For the first time, 01Health is publicly launching the platform as a standalone product that practices, clinic groups, and dental service organisations can license directly, with no requirement to use 01Health’s clinical brands.

That distinction matters for the unit economics. A 32Co clinic is a customer of a service, which means revenue is tied to patient volumes and treatment mix. A licensed 01Health platform is a customer of software, which means revenue is tied to seats, locations, and the breadth of specialities a practice wants to run on top. The shift from operator to infrastructure provider changes the growth model: 01Health can scale without standing up new clinics, by adding licensees instead.

It is also a more competitive shift. The product now has to win against general practice management software, against specialist referral platforms, and against the in-house workflows that hospital trusts have built. The four-year head start inside 32Co is the answer 01Health will lean on: by the time competitors pitch to a clinic group, 01Health can point to a network that has already run tens of thousands of cases through the system. The earlier 32Co raise, which EU-Startups reported at €2.5 million, was the capital that built that head start.

The Cap Table Behind the Round

The investor mix signals a deliberate blend of UK growth equity, specialist health backers, and operator angels. Gresham House Ventures, a London-based growth equity firm, is leading the round. The three follow-on participation names are existing investors from earlier rounds: Balderton Capital, Eka Ventures, and Wavemaker Three-Sixty Health (Wavemaker360), the US-based seed and Series A health specialist. Nicolas Cary, the Blockchain.com co-founder, joined as an angel.

That mix gives 01Health a London growth-equity lead, a healthcare-specialist US investor with relevant US market context for the Atlantic push, and an angel whose background is in scaling consumer technology products, a useful counterweight to a clinical-heavy cap table.

Crossing the Atlantic

The US is one of three named priorities for the new capital, alongside scaling the UK network and supporting the public launch of the platform. Platform trials are already underway across the Atlantic, and the company has appointed a Head of US Commercial Operations to anchor the build-out. The choice to put a named commercial lead in place before scaling sales is a small but telling operational choice: the US clinic market is fragmented, and the sales motion is partnership-driven rather than self-serve.

US expansion for a UK clinic-software company is not automatic. The clinical, regulatory, and reimbursement structures differ sharply from the NHS-shaped world 01Health was built in. The early bet is that the platform’s specialist-oversight and clinical-protocols modules are the most portable layers, because the underlying clinical model (remote specialist reviewing a local clinician’s case) travels better than the UK-specific patient-acquisition and pricing assumptions. That is a hypothesis the next 12 months will test.

For now, the company is positioning the US presence as a market-validation exercise as much as a revenue line. A US licensee in any one of the specialities 01Health already supports would do more for the next round than a UK-only rollout, because it would prove the platform travels.

The Real Test Runs Beyond Dentistry

01Health started in dental for a reason. Orthodontics and dental sleep medicine are high-volume, well-defined specialities with established clinical protocols and a willingness among patients to pay out of pocket. They were an efficient place to harden a platform against a real, paying clinical load. The company has now grown past that starting point, and trials are already underway in additional clinical areas beyond dental care, pointing to a broader range of healthcare specialities on the platform’s roadmap.

The standalone launch is the test bed for that broader ambition. The same software that runs orthodontics in a UK high-street clinic has to be configured for, say, dermatology or cardiology, and the configuration has to be done by 01Health rather than the licensee, because that is the part of the value the platform is selling. Each new speciality is, in effect, a product launch with its own protocols, its own specialist-oversight network, and its own patient acquisition playbook. The dental work bought the company the time to learn that muscle.

The competitive context matters here too. UK specialist access has long been bottlenecked by the workforce gap 32Co was designed around, and the new round positions 01Health to be one of the platforms arguing for community-based delivery as a structural answer. It is not the only one. In the same 2026 window, another £15M UK health Series A in 2026 went to a different model of distributed clinical care, and the broader UK healthtech funding pattern is full of infrastructure rounds targeting the same bottleneck from different angles.

Why Specialist Care Has to Move Out of Hospitals

The deeper case for the round sits outside the cap table. Specialist care in the UK is concentrated in a small number of hospital trusts and urban centres, and the workforce behind it is thin: the 32Co press page cites roughly 1,000 orthodontists serving a population of more than 60 million, a ratio that explains why waiting lists run long and travel times run short for the patients who do get seen. A platform that lets a general dental practice deliver specialist-grade care, with remote specialist oversight baked in, is a structural answer to that ratio, not a workaround.

Whether the answer scales beyond the specialities 01Health has already proven is the open question the next funding round will be priced on. The $15M buys the company the time, the US licensee it needs, and the headroom to push the platform into new clinical areas. For now, the platform’s most interesting feature is not what it does, it is where it has been running, quietly, for four years inside a UK dental network that most of the market has never heard of.