Oxford spin-out Navenio secures £400,000 in funding to ease the impact of COVID-19 on the UK’s hospitals.
Funding for Navenio
Navenio, a healthcare scale-up, uses state of the art location-based technology to increase the throughput of hospital teams. Now, they have been awarded a £400,00 grant for their ‘Intelligent Workforce Solution’. UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) gave the grant in order to allow Navenio to address the impact of COVID-19 on hospitals. Navenio’s infrastructure-free indoor location tech will enable teams to be in the right place at the right time, using smartphone data. The money was awarded to projects that seek to mitigate the health, social, economic, cultural and environmental impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Who are Navenio?
Navenio is a spin-out company of Oxford University, established in 2015. Since then, they have an ever-growing team of more than 60 people and are multi-award winning. They also qualified as a finalist in the KPMG British Tech Pioneers of 2020 programme for its outstanding technology. Notably, they provide infrastructure-free indoor location solutions. Or, in layman terms, GPS for indoor use. Their innovative fusion of four technologies allows immediate actionable insight, using just the sensors of a smartphone.
Addressing Market Needs
Their technology has important implications for the COVID-19 pandemic which has exacerbated the need to improve research management in UK hospitals. Now, hospitals can use smartphones and rely on Navenio’s AI-led Intelligent Workforce Solution.
With the recent funding, Navenio can advance the technology to improve deployment speed and provide data analytics. This, in turn, will help hospitals manage resources, increase capacity and reduce risk of infection. The technology will be especially crucial when managing COVID-19 in understaffed hospitals. More than that, the data yielded will be the first UK-wide statistics on resource utilisation helping local management in future decision-making for hospitals at different stages of the pandemic.
Collaboration Between UKRI and Navenio
The funding marks an important collaboration between UKRI and Navenio which is beneficial for both parties. Navenio has the potential not only to solve crucial problems of the current crisis, but also shed light on how these challenges might be better managed going forward. Ian Campbell, Executive Chair of Innovate UK, commented. “Those awarded funding from our competition will support the UK in delivering potential solutions and services to facilitate our recovery from the pandemic”.
Tim Weil, CEO of Navenio, added “this funding will help us to continue dramatically improving patient flow within hospitals around the UK by prioritising tasks for individual teams. With COVID-19 cases rising, it is crucial that hospitals are prepared and have access to the best technology.”
