Monica Hart, MBA, MA, BA, FCIM

Ten UK health investors worth following. 👇 Continuing the series - this week it focuses on the people funding health ventures. One pattern across this list - they can describe the payer. Plenty of people who fund health can talk about the science and the size of the market. Far fewer know the intricacies of commercial growth - the budget and signories needed to scale. If you are raising this autumn, these are the ten conversations are worth having. In no particular order 👇 Will Fraser-Allen is Managing Partner at AlbionVC. Dr. Nadine Hachach-Haram FRCS (Plast), BEM founded Proximie and is Co-Managing Partner at Meridian Health Ventures. Simon Braham is Chief Investment Officer at Northern Gritstone. Backing university spinouts across the North. Camilla Dolan is General Partner at Eka Ventures. She keeps returning to the gap - 75% of outcomes shaped by prevention, which receives 5% of spend. Erin Platts is CEO of Octopus Investments and Octopus Ventures, judges investors on empathy, humility and transparency. Triin Linamagi is Founding Partner at Sie Ventures and Managing Partner of the Arāya Sie Fund - pointing a diversity-focused fund squarely at AI and deeptech. Greta Anderson is Managing Director at Balderton. One of the sharpest healthtech investors, having argued that ambient scribes have already peaked and the value will go to the incumbent EHR vendors. Bruno Holthof is Partner at EQT Life Sciences - seven years running Oxford University Hospitals, he credits his turnarounds there and in Antwerp to putting the right clinical leader over each service line. Esther Reynal de St Michel Richardot is Founding Managing Partner at THENA Capital, a UK medtech fund that closed at £45m in June. On being a woman-founded fund, she is clear: "We invest in entrepreneurs and have a gender-smart investment strategy." Marc Subirats is General Partner at Nina Capital . Sold his telemedicine company Advance Medical to Teladoc after fifteen years building it, and writes on the move from founder to funder. Follow the generalists to see what your company is being compared against. Follow the specialists to see what good looks like within the sector. Save the list, follow each, and tell me in the comments - who else belongs on a UK health investor list, and why? ----- I'm Sara. I run Well Purposed, a commercial strategy practice for funded HealthTech and longevity founders. I built Healthy Nibbles from a kitchen to £10m ARR across the UK, Europe and Africa. I chair Biomarx, sit on the board at Youmi and on the WELL Nourishment advisory at IWBI, and I'm writing The Prevention Economy.

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Immediate opportunities for #HealthTech companies are emerging from NHS England’s new Medium Term Planning Framework.   What are they? Can your company respond?   Find out in our summary of what health tech companies need to know. Access our full analysis of what matters to the sector, available for free now: https://lnkd.in/eydChYju #NHS #MTPF #MediumTermPlanningFramework

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Many healthtech companies underestimate what it actually takes to generate commercial traction in the UK. On paper, it looks like a highly attractive market: • Centralised healthcare system • Strong research ecosystem • Clear demand for digital innovation But in practice, commercial progress is often much slower than expected. From working across the market, a few things consistently stand out: 1. Regulatory readiness directly impacts revenue timelines Delays around clinical safety, DTAC, or data governance don’t just slow progress — they delay commercial deployment. 2. Product classification affects your entire go-to-market strategy If your solution is classified as a medical device, your sales cycle, buyer, and procurement pathway all change. 3. Clinical buy-in is a commercial lever, not just a clinical one Without internal champions, pilots rarely convert into paid deployments. 4. Buyers don’t purchase features — they purchase outcomes Efficiency gains, cost savings, and operational impact are what unlock budgets. 5. The UK is a credibility market Winning here — whether NHS or private — materially strengthens your position for future growth. The reality is: Commercial success in UK healthcare sits at the intersection of regulatory, clinical, and go-to-market execution. This is where many strong products lose momentum. At @Digital Health Collective, we work with healthtech companies to translate strong products into real commercial traction in the UK market. #DigitalHealth #HealthTech #UKHealthcare

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Jonathan Watts Interesting article, and Acacium's accounts files at companies house make grim reading. Knowing people who have worked there, and customers of the business, it seems like a well managed business, which has invested in good technology to support the NHS. c18months ago, the NHS switched from prioritising patient care and waiting lists to prioritising financial balance. Cutting extra clinics and extra operating lists are an easy way to do this in the short-term. At the margin, this has a huge impact on agencies which supply staff and manage bank staff for the NHS.

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⏳ Only 19 days left to apply for Innovate UK’s Advancing Innovation in Accelerated Cancer Diagnosis competition. Up to £25.4 million is available to support collaborative projects developing and clinically validating technologies for earlier cancer detection and diagnosis, with projects addressing less common cancers particularly encouraged. Key details: 🔹 Total eligible project costs: £1.5m-£4m 🔹 Project duration: 24-36 months 🔹 Consortia must include a UK SME claiming funding and clinical expertise 🔹 Deadline: 11am on Wednesday, 28th October 2026 Strong applications will need a clear clinical need, a credible validation plan and a convincing route towards regulatory approval and NHS adoption. RedKnight Consultancy Ltd's blog explains the scope, eligibility and funding available, alongside what makes a strong proposal. Read it here 👇 https://lnkd.in/etqbMyJU Contact RedKnight for a free consultation to discuss your project and the support you need before the deadline. #InnovateUK #Cancer #Diagnostics #LifeSciences #GrantFunding #RedKnight

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For those of you wondering "what happened to all the grant funding that Innovate UK used to direct into healthcare?", this article from The Times is illuminating. "Over the past year several sources of public innovation funding have been frozen, leaving firms in limbo. Next month, the reason for the pause will be revealed. I expect gnashing of teeth: there will be lots of losers, as well as some winners.   How much of the £2.1 billion of spending that Innovate UK handled in the year to April 2025 (including its own budget and delivery of services for other Whitehall departments) has been paused since then remains unclear. The agency has continued with new grant-based competitions and challenges designed to support innovation that tackles specific social and economic goals. This week I learnt that Innovate UK is finalising its new-look grant schemes. It plans to start talking about them in March, and for the cash to start flowing again from April. The type of funding will look very different. I hear that Innovate UK is shifting from supporting mainly projects to backing individual companies to succeed as they scale up from small ventures into big ones. I would expect some of Innovate UK’s “competitions” to survive the cull. They have the merit of signalling long-term backing for specific technologies that Britain sees a strategic need to develop. I’ve heard good things in particular about the Faraday Battery Challenge, which Innovate UK ran from 2017 to 2025 with a £610 million funding budget to build resilience in Britain’s battery sector. There was a similar long-term commitment to build our quantum computing know-how in 2013 that we are now benefiting from. From what I’m told, the new Innovate UK promise is as follows: a) It will act at pace (which is good as it missed its target for processing its grants by about 30 working days in each of the past two years). b) It will direct its resources to the government’s eight key sectors, identified in the Industrial Strategy. These are broad, politically charged, and range from advanced manufacturing to the creative industries. Within these guiderails, Innovate UK plans to be precise in its interventions, providing more taxpayer cash to our “best companies” and, you’ve guessed it, less to others, while somehow ensuring there is opportunity for all, wherever you live in the UK. Insiders are framing it all as a “strategic transformation”. “We are going to be very clear-eyed about where we are investing,” Tom Adeyoola, the agency’s executive chair told an audience at the Royal Society this week. Encouragingly, Adeyoola wants Innovate UK, and sister government agencies such as the British Business Bank and the National Wealth Fund, along with private capital, to create a new generation of national champions. The Vodafones of tomorrow, as he put it." #grants #grantfunding Innovate UK Bidshaper

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