For years, Dr. Sonia Szamocki watched the same frustration play out in her NHS accident and emergency shifts: patients with specialist needs but no clear path to care. The specialists existed, somewhere, clustered in expensive postcodes. The patients didn't live there.
So she built the software herself.
On June 10, 01Health—the London healthtech outfit Szamocki founded in 2022—closed a $15 million Series A led by Gresham House Ventures. The round brings total capital raised to $25 million and, perhaps more importantly, marks a commercial pivot that few consumer healthcare startups attempt: transforming proprietary technology into licensed infrastructure.
What began as software powering 01Health's own orthodontics brand, 32Co, is now being packaged and sold to independent clinics across the UK and US. It's a bet that the unglamorous plumbing of specialist care—patient acquisition, clinical workflows, billing logic, AI triage—can become a business in itself.
Balderton Capital, which led 32Co's £2.2 million seed round in June 2023, returned for the Series A alongside Eka Ventures, Wavemaker Three-Sixty Health, and Nicolas Cary, the Blockchain.com co-founder turned angel investor. Back in 2023, the company operated almost entirely under the 32Co brand. Few outside the firm knew the deeper platform existed.
The Unglamorous Work of Access
Szamocki's background reads like a blueprint for healthtech founders: NHS physician, BCG Digital Ventures stint, then straight into building. But journalists report her focus as being on distribution rather than disruption or consumer empowerment—the usual venture script.
"The biggest bottleneck in healthcare isn't cost; it's access," she told reporters in June 2026 interviews. "Specialists are concentrated in a handful of postcodes; patients aren't."
The platform 01Health built is modular and dense with functionality. It combines AI-driven patient screening (branded "01 Intelligence," which operates under human clinical oversight), specialist referral networks, appointment scheduling, billing, and procurement tools. Think of it as an end-to-end operating system for specialist services, designed to let a general dentist offer orthodontics or sleep apnea treatment without hiring full-time specialists or wrestling with fragmented software.
For 32Co, the company's orthodontics line, that system has already achieved what Dentistry.co.uk described in June 2026: most Britons now live within 30 minutes of a participating dentist. The company's second brand, Aerox Health, launched in 2025 to tackle dental sleep medicine using the same infrastructure.
Now that infrastructure is for sale.
From Proprietary to Platform
The shift from running your own brands to licensing the scaffolding beneath them is tricky. You're asking independent practices to trust software built for a would-be competitor. But 01Health spent 12 months piloting the platform with select enterprise partners—dental service organizations, mostly—before going public with the offering.
It appears to have worked, at least well enough to convince Gresham House Ventures, a UK growth equity firm not previously known for healthcare infrastructure bets at this scale. The round structure suggests confidence in the B2B play, though 01Health hasn't disclosed valuation.
As of June 2026, the company employs more than 100 people and has appointed a Head of US Commercial Operations. Trials with American practices are underway, though the firm has been characteristically vague about timelines or target markets. The platform's modular design allows it to extend beyond dentistry—into dermatology, perhaps, or women's health—but no additional verticals have been announced.
Consolidation and Caution
The round arrives at an odd moment for digital health. Rock Health analysis cited by Healthcare Dive in April 2026 noted that early-stage capital is concentrating in fewer startups. The funding bonanza of 2021 is a memory; investors want proof of business model durability, not just user growth.
In that context, 01Health's pivot looks pragmatic. Consumer healthcare brands are expensive to scale and vulnerable to patient churn. Selling software to practices shifts the customer acquisition burden and creates recurring revenue. Industry watchers have drawn comparisons to DentalMonitoring in orthodontics and UK-based peers like Semble, Evaro, and JAAQ—companies attempting to bring clinical governance and digital tooling to fragmented care markets.
Whether the model scales remains an open question. Dental practices are notoriously resistant to new software, and specialist care networks are as much about relationships and referrals as they are about technology. But Szamocki has already threaded one unlikely needle—building a national orthodontics network from scratch—and investors seem willing to bet she can do it again. This time, she's not the only one selling.
