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It’s 8am. You’re trying to book a GP appointment. You call, and you get the hold music. You hang up, redial, and you’re back in the queue — except now you’re twelfth, not third. You try the online booking form but it closed the moment slots ran out at 8:01. You give up and try again tomorrow.
This isn’t a one-off. It’s the daily experience of trying to reach a GP practice in the UK, repeated millions of times a week. According to the NHS GP Patient Survey 2026, just over half of patients find it easy to get through to their practice by phone. In an ideal world that number would be far higher.
UK GP practices employ around 85,000 receptionists yet millions of calls still go unanswered. Hold times can stretch past 30 minutes and patients ring back over and over just to be heard. Practices and reception teams are doing their best. However, call volumes and the pressures on primary care have grown faster than teams can keep up with.
This is the problem Intouchnow.ai is solving.
Intouchnow answers GP practice phone calls 24/7, in over 80 languages and 200+ regional accents. It captures symptoms in the patient’s own words, triages the call, books appointments, and writes the outcome directly into NHS clinical systems.
The product is designed with inclusivity and safety in mind. While up to 70% of calls are handled without human intervention, the system routes clinical or complex queries directly to practice staff. And if the AI can’t handle a call, it hands it over to Intouchnow’s human reception team rather than dropping it back on the practice. For transparency, patients are told from the outset that they’re talking to an AI system, and can ask for a human at any point.
We’re already seeing how AI agents used mindfully and thoughtfully can generate positive outcomes. Across a sample of 18 practices that cover 240,000 patients, calls answered within two minutes rose from half to two thirds. In addition, mean wait times fell by over 30%. In a striking example of how impactful Intouchnow is, one Surrey practice saw its queue of calls freed up entirely, giving back over 400 hours of receptionist time across four months.
We met Daniel Park through an introduction made by Ada scout Omar Daniel, a healthtech specialist and entrepreneur. What impressed us most was that Daniel had already spent five years running the human call centres before founding Intouchnow. He lived this problem first-hand, on the phones, long before AI voice agents were a thing.
That experience gave Daniel and his team a rare depth of customer understanding: from knowing exactly what a GP practice needs from its phone line, to appointment workflows and the administrative requirements of primary care. The results? The business got to over £1m in annual revenues with no VC funding, 100% trial-to-paid conversion, and zero churn across 100+ practices.
While these results were promising, we also saw a substantial fit with our Economic Empowerment investment theme. There’s already a chronic recruitment crisis for reception staff, and Intouchnow’s AI agent takes on the calls nobody is able to answer, rather than pulling receptionists away from face-to-face patients and other tasks. The business also resonated with our Healthy Ageing theme, given the potential to improve patient access to primary care, particularly for elderly and non-English-speaking patients, who are disproportionately affected by accessibility issues.
Intouchnow has closed a £2.3m Seed, led by a £1.1m investment from Ada Ventures. This represents our first VC investment into an AI voice agent operating in the NHS and with growth to over 150 practices already, we can’t wait to see how much more positive impact the business and the team can have on primary care.
Everyone knows the morning phone rush to get through to their GP. Daniel spent five years running call centres that handle these calls, so he knows the problem first-hand. That’s a big part of why we backed him to build an AI company around it. Intouchnow helps more patients get through to their GP, across dozens of languages and accents, while giving practice staff more time for patients. This is exactly the kind of practical, responsible AI we believe can strengthen access to care across the NHS.
Michael Tefula, Principal and Head of Product, Ada Ventures