Irish healthcare technology company Akara has raised $5.5m (£4.1m) in venture funding to accelerate the adoption of its AI technology in hospitals.
The latest investment brings the company’s total funding to $12.3m (£9.4m).
Akara, which has offices in Ireland, Los Angeles and the UK, combines privacy-preserving sensors with robotics and AI tools to help hospitals reduce administrative work, coordinate services and treat more patients.
The funding round was led by Locke Health, with participation from VTC Ventures, the EIC Fund, CommonKind and NovaVector Holdings, alongside existing investors ACT, Atlantic Bridge and Enterprise Ireland, as well as a number of strategic angel investors.
Akara will use the funding to accelerate adoption of its technology in hospitals, expand its operations and engineering teams in Ireland, and develop its AI agents for a wider range of healthcare applications.
The company was founded by a team of engineers and scientists from Trinity College Dublin.
Its founders previously gained international recognition for developing Stevie, a social robot that featured on the cover of TIME magazine.
Dr Conor McGinn, co-founder and CEO of Akara, said: “Hospitals are under enormous pressure to do more with the people and resources they already have. We want to give staff time back and help hospitals treat more patients.
“To achieve that sustainably and at scale, the technology has to protect privacy, be straightforward to deploy and affordable.
“Combining thermal sensing with AI that runs on the device makes those goals central to how our technology works.”
Hospitals face growing demand for care, while staff shortages and rising costs are limiting their ability to respond.
It’s estimated that as much as 40 per cent of nursing time is spent on routine administrative and coordination tasks, including manual data entry, scheduling, phone calls and repeated checks on whether rooms, patients and teams are ready.
These fragmented processes divert staff from patient care and leave valuable capacity unused.
Akara’s proprietary wall-mounted sensors automatically capture how clinical spaces are used.
Software acts like air traffic controller
Its software acts like an air traffic controller, detecting key events and notifying staff when they’re needed.
AI agents allow staff to ask questions about the data in natural language and generate reports, reducing the effort required to turn operational information into practical improvements.
Automatically capturing how hospital spaces are used can provide valuable insights, but conventional approaches using cameras raise privacy concerns and often require costly, disruptive infrastructure upgrades.
At the heart of Akara’s technology is a combination of thermal sensing and edge AI designed to overcome these barriers.
Its sensors use thermal data to understand activity without capturing detailed visual images of patients or staff, while the AI needed to interpret that data runs directly on the device.
This allows key events to be detected locally, limits the transmission of sensitive information and reduces reliance on additional computing infrastructure, making the technology simpler and more affordable to deploy at scale.
Patrick Brennan, managing director of Locke Health, said: “Our team brings deep experience in healthcare commercialisation and a clear understanding of what hospitals need to adopt new technology.
Rhinoflux wins KPMG Global Tech Innovator 2025 at Web Summit
“Akara stands out for its potential to deliver a compelling return on investment without placing heavy demands on hospital budgets, infrastructure or staff.
“We believe it could be a disruptive force in healthcare, and we’re excited to help the team turn that potential into widespread adoption and measurable impact.”
James Ramey, managing director of VTC Ventures, said: “Hospitals need AI that can deliver practical improvements without adding significant cost or integration complexity.”
Akara’s thermal sensing technology was named one of TIME magazine’s Best Inventions of 2025.