AI health tech from ex-Palantir lead raises £12m

Frontier Health, an AI startup offering administrative tools to the NHS, has secured a $16m (£12.09m) seed funding round.

Founded by the former healthcare lead at Palantir Technologies, Frontier Health was launched in 2024 to address the issue of understaffed NHS clinics and administrative failures driving up waiting times.

The company has developed JUNO, an AI “teammate” which it said can adapt automatically to the processes and needs of the systems it is plugged into.

“I spent years inside the NHS across more than 40 hospitals, watching brilliant, dedicated people drown in process,” said Rachel Finegold, founder and chief executive of Frontier Health.

“Not because they weren’t good enough, but because the tools around them hadn’t kept pace with the demand placed on them. The admin that should be keeping patients moving was becoming the thing that slowed everything down. That is a solvable problem. JUNO exists to solve it.”

According to the startup, JUNO has been rolled out across a number of NHS Trusts already, including in East Sussex.

“The pressure on NHS Trusts to deliver better patient care with constrained resources is not going away,” said Steve Reipond, improvement director at East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust.

“What JUNO has shown us is that there is a smarter way to work. By reducing the manual tasks that consume so much of our teams’ time and giving our operational leads the visibility they need to make faster, better decisions, we have been able to improve patient outcomes.”

“Managing an emergency department means constantly balancing immediate patient needs with what’s coming next.

“JUNO has given me and my team a level of visibility and forward planning that we simply didn’t have before, from forecasting upcoming capacity pressures to making patient information far more accessible and actionable in the moment.”

The investment was led by Atomico and included participation from firstminute capital and XYZ.