- 01Health has raised $15 million in a Series A led by Gresham House Ventures, with follow-on from Balderton Capital, Eka Ventures, and Wavemaker360.
- The startup’s specialist dental network already reaches 90% of the UK population within 30 minutes — built quietly as the infrastructure underneath 32Co and Aerox Health before today’s public launch.
- 01Health has raised $25 million in total and employs more than 100 people across its AI, technology, clinical, and commercial teams.
When Dr Sonia Szamocki was working as an NHS A&E doctor in London, she kept seeing the same thing: patients who needed a specialist couldn’t get to one — not because the expertise didn’t exist, but because it never left the hospital. She spent time at BCG working out why the infrastructure failed. Then she built a replacement.
Now, London-based 01Health, founded in 2022 by Dr Sonia Szamocki, has raised $15 million in a Series A led by Gresham House Ventures. Balderton Capital, which led 32Co’s seed round in June 2023 — Szamocki’s first institutional backer — returns here alongside Eka Ventures and Wavemaker360. Angels, including Nicolas Cary, co-founder of Blockchain.com, also participated. Total funding now stands at $25 million across all rounds.
The infrastructure nobody knew existed
Until today, 01Health’s platform has been running entirely behind two brands most users would not have associated with it: 32Co, the UK’s top-rated clear aligner system by dentists, and Aerox Health, its dental sleep medicine brand. Both sit on top of the same underlying system — clinical protocols, specialist oversight, AI-powered patient acquisition, workflow management, and communication tools in a single stack. Today, that system goes public as 01Health, available for the first time to external practices, practice groups, and dental service organisations under licence.
The traction underneath the rebrand is real. Through 32Co, 01Health has built a specialist dental network that now reaches 90% of the UK population within 30 minutes of a participating clinic. 32Co is ranked 16th on the Startups 100 Index for 2026 — a list that has previously identified Monzo, Deliveroo, and HelloFresh at equivalent stages.
Why the NHS bottleneck matters
More than 7.3 million patients sit on NHS elective waiting lists, with only 62% treated within the statutory 18-week standard — a target the NHS has not met since 2015. The government’s stated strategy is to push more care into community settings. 01Health’s argument is that local clinics already have the patients, the relationships, and the physical capacity to deliver more specialist care — what they have always lacked is the infrastructure to do it safely and at scale.
The platform works by giving local clinics remote access to specialist oversight. An independent dental practice, for example, can treat orthodontic patients under real-time supervision from a specialist who never needs to be in the room. The specialist stays in the system. What changes is where the care happens — and who can access it.
“The biggest bottleneck in healthcare isn’t cost; it’s access. Specialists are concentrated in a handful of postcodes; patients aren’t. 32Co and Aerox have already brought expert dental treatments to areas of the UK where such treatments were inaccessible, proving the concept that specialist care could be democratised if the right technology layer existed underneath it,” said Dr Sonia Szamocki, founder and CEO, 01Health.
“Over the last four years, they’ve built 32Co into the UK’s highest-rated clear aligner provider and successfully expanded from orthodontics into sleep medicine with Aerox Health, both delivered through its network of dentists. What stood out to us from the beginning was Sonia’s ambition to build the infrastructure that enables specialist healthcare to be delivered through general practitioner networks at scale,” said Greta Anderson, managing director, Balderton Capital.
“Demand for specialist care continues to grow globally, while access to specialist expertise remains constrained. 01Health’s platform enables specialist clinicians to support significantly larger networks of general practitioners remotely, creating a highly scalable model for expanding patient access to specialist-led care,” said Zixin Pan, associate director, Gresham House Ventures.
Beyond dentistry
Dentistry is where 01Health proved its model — but the press release is deliberate about not stopping there. Trials in clinical areas beyond dentistry are already underway, though the company has not disclosed which specialities. A US commercial head has been appointed and platform trials are live. The platform is described as “vertical-agnostic by design” — meaning the same underlying system of protocols, oversight, and workflow management should, in theory, apply to any speciality where access is bottlenecked by geography or infrastructure.
That ambition raises an obvious question. Dentistry has standardised governance, referral structures, and a clear economic model. Specialities like musculoskeletal, mental health, or dermatology carry different regulatory complexity, different clinical liability, and different commissioning dynamics. The orthodontics track record does not transfer automatically. The 12-month enterprise pilot that preceded this public launch was with dental partners — not with the adjacent specialities 01Health is now signalling.
The competition
Semble, which raised £30 million in a Series C in June 2026, focuses on practice management infrastructure for private outpatient providers — software that runs the clinic rather than software that enables new clinical services. The distinction matters: Semble helps existing providers operate more efficiently; 01Health is trying to extend what those providers can offer clinically. DentalMonitoring, the Paris-based AI orthodontic monitoring platform backed by Crédit Mutuel Innovation, is the closest direct competitor in the dental AI space, though it focuses on monitoring existing orthodontic treatments rather than enabling new ones.
Market context
According to Statista, the UK digital health market is projected to reach $7.45 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 6.97% from 2025, when revenue stood at $5.32 billion. The largest segment — Digital Treatment & Care — is already valued at $2.77 billion in 2025, reflecting growing demand for technology that enables clinical care to be delivered outside traditional hospital settings. The structural pressure driving 01Health’s opportunity is not new but is intensifying: specialist workforce shortages in the UK are projected to reach 360,000 by 2036 according to the Health Foundation — a gap that cannot be filled by training alone and will increasingly require technology to distribute the expertise that does exist.
The next 18 months will test whether a platform that works for orthodontics translates to clinical areas where the stakes are higher, the governance more complex, and the incumbents better entrenched. The dental proof of concept is solid. Everything beyond it is still being written.
