Cera launches AI Lab with eight-figure care investment

Cera has launched an AI Lab focused on care services and will invest an eight-figure sum in the new unit.

The London-based health technology group said the lab will develop, test and license artificial intelligence tools for care providers in the UK and overseas. It will build on software and robotics already used in home care and NHS-linked services, with products aimed at easing pressure on health and social care systems facing rising demand and staff shortages.

The move comes as providers in many countries struggle to meet the needs of ageing populations. Cera cited research showing that one in four older people globally have unmet long-term care needs, while only one in three reporting countries can meet that demand.

According to the company, the lab will use a dataset built from more than 300 billion anonymised patient health insights. Those records have been gathered through 2.5 million home visits a month carried out by more than 10,000 carers and nurses.

The new unit will be staffed in part by Entrepreneurs in Residence working alongside Cera’s data scientists, clinical leaders and existing AI teams. Their role will be to identify bottlenecks in care delivery and develop tools that can be tested with patients in their homes before wider deployment.

Existing Tools

Cera said it already has agreements with two-thirds of NHS care regions and more than 100 UK local governments. That network gives it a route to roll out new products at scale and gather evidence on their safety and impact in day-to-day use.

Products already in use include predictive models designed to identify health risks, recruitment and retention software for care staff, and home care robots that remind older people about nutrition and medication. The company said its predictive tools identify health risks with more than 80% accuracy, reduce falls by 20% and cut avoidable hospital admissions by more than half.

A third-party report by Faculty AI found Cera’s tools have saved the UK Government more than GBP £1 billion. Cera said the savings came through lower levels of unnecessary hospital use.

It also said its home care robots increase provider capacity by 20% and raise productivity by up to 80%, while AI recruitment systems double hiring volumes and halve time to hire. Its AI retention systems, it added, intervene seven times faster than human teams to address staff burnout.

Government Backing

The UK Government has backed the launch, linking it to wider efforts to strengthen public services and support technology exports. Ministers have also pointed to the use of AI in administrative and diagnostic tasks elsewhere in the health service.

“Cera’s world-first lab will put precious time back in the hands of healthcare workers, so they can focus on delivering the care people depend on. It is proof that AI can power the transformation of NHS and healthcare systems around the world.

It builds on our rollout of other practical time-saving tech like ambient voice technology, freeing up clinicians from tedious note-taking, and deploying AI diagnostic tools that spot diseases like lung cancer in record time,” said Kanishka Narayan, UK AI Minister at the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology.

Commercial Model

Cera said the lab will focus on producing products rather than creating separate companies. It added that it is open to external collaboration and that its Entrepreneurs in Residence will work under an equity-based incentive model.

The company describes itself as Europe’s largest health technology business and said it generates around USD $500 million in annualised revenue. It combines home care delivery with in-house data, AI development and robotics, a model it says allows it to build products directly from frontline care activity and license them to other providers.

Dr Ben Maruthappu, founder and chief executive of Cera, said the launch reflects the scale of pressure on care systems and the need to use automation in areas that do not require direct human contact.

“As the population ages, healthcare systems globally are drowning in demand. The critical way to solve this crisis is by using technology – from AI algorithms to robotics – to empower healthcare workers to achieve more with less. People often fear that technology will replace empathy, but to save human care, we must automate everything but the human.

Ultimately, given the severe workforce challenges across the sector, the alternative to AI & robotics isn’t human care. For millions right now, the alternative is no care at all. By proving this technology works at a national scale in the UK, we are creating a blueprint that can be exported globally through our AI Lab to fix broken healthcare systems worldwide, keeping patients out of hospital and in the comfort of their own homes,” said Maruthappu.