A Cambridge-based company called Flok Health has raised $12.5 million in an oversubscribed Series A round, led by Albion VC with participation from existing backers Eka VC and Form Ventures and new investor Mercia Ventures, to expand what it describes as Europe’s first AI system approved to carry out an entire course of medical treatment — triage, diagnosis, treatment and discharge — without a clinician reviewing each individual case. The round, announced in early June 2026, follows a 12-week pilot in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough in which more than 2,500 NHS patients used the AI clinic for back pain and the local waiting list for musculoskeletal appointments fell by 55 percent, from a baseline wait of 18 weeks.
What the AI clinic actually does
Patients referred to Flok’s service open a mobile app and are offered on-demand appointments with no waitlist, in place of the usual route of waiting weeks for an in-person assessment with a National Health Service musculoskeletal physiotherapist. The system is designed to carry out the full pathway for straightforward back-pain cases: assessing the patient’s symptoms, prescribing a treatment plan, delivering guided sessions, and discharging the patient once treatment is complete, all without a human clinician checking the case along the way. Flok’s own reporting of the Cambridgeshire pilot says the platform successfully managed 98 percent of referred patients entirely within the digital environment, with only a small share escalated to human clinicians.
A video call that is not actually a video call
One of the more unusual details of Flok’s product is how it presents itself to patients. Rather than a chatbot or a text-based interface, the app uses footage of a real human physiotherapist, manipulated in real time, to simulate a live video call that appears to respond directly to what the patient says and does during a session. The intent, according to the company, is to preserve the feel of an in-person physiotherapy appointment — a clinician watching your movement and giving verbal cues — while the underlying decisions about diagnosis and treatment are made by the AI system rather than a person on the other end of the call.
Why Flok calls itself a medical device, not an app
Flok has told reporters it is registered with the Care Quality Commission and holds Class IIa medical device certification in the UK, a regulatory tier above the simple wellness-app classification that most digital health tools in this category use. Chief executive and co-founder Finn Stevenson has argued that the certification is central to the company’s credibility, saying medical device certification ‘is not just a legal requirement, it’s a valuable way to demonstrate that our service has met the highest standard for safety and clinical performance.’ The company, co-founded by Stevenson and chief technology officer Ric da Silva, says the new funding will go toward scaling the back-pain service across more of the UK and training the underlying AI on two new pathways — hip and knee pain, and women’s pelvic health conditions — both due to launch this year, alongside an initial push into international markets.
The case for urgency: NHS waiting lists
Flok’s pitch rests heavily on the scale of the UK’s elective-care backlog. As of early 2025, roughly 6.25 million people in England were waiting for a combined 7.43 million elective treatments or appointments, and musculoskeletal complaints like back pain are among the most common reasons for referral. NHS England has separately floated a review of physiotherapy referral pathways aimed at speeding access, and trials in 41 areas are already testing whether patients can be assessed and treated by physiotherapists based directly in GP practices, rather than referred onward to a separate waiting list. Flok’s backers argue that an AI system capable of absorbing a meaningful share of straightforward cases could ease that backlog faster than hiring alone, given how long it already takes to train and register new physiotherapists.
The physiotherapy profession’s pushback
The Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, the UK’s professional body for physiotherapists, has raised several objections to Flok’s model. Its health informatics lead has argued that AI cannot yet replicate the clinical judgment of a physiotherapist registered with a statutory regulator, particularly for patients whose presentation is more complex than a textbook case. The organization has also warned that app-only care risks leaving behind patients who cannot or do not want to use a smartphone for treatment, potentially widening rather than narrowing health inequalities. CSP chief executive John Cowman has gone further, arguing that the underlying problem is recruitment freezes that are currently keeping newly qualified physiotherapists from finding NHS jobs, and that AI tools should supplement a larger physiotherapy workforce rather than substitute for one. Separately, outside analysts have noted that Flok’s pilot results are self-reported by the company and its NHS trust partner rather than independently audited, and that discharging a patient without any clinician review carries a different liability profile than tools that merely advise a human decision-maker.
What’s next
With the new funding in hand, Flok’s near-term test is whether its 55 percent waiting-list reduction and 98 percent fully-digital completion rate from a single regional pilot hold up as the service scales to new UK regions and entirely new conditions like hip, knee and pelvic health complaints, which involve different risks and more varied patient presentations than back pain. The company’s international expansion plans will also put its Class IIa certification and CQC registration in front of regulators in other countries, who may reach different conclusions than UK regulators did about how much autonomy an AI system should have over discharge decisions. For the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, the more pressing question remains whether tools like Flok’s end up easing NHS waiting lists as a complement to the physiotherapy workforce, or whether they become an argument for not rebuilding it.
Photo: 4379051 / PIXABAY via Pixabay
