Akara, a Trinity College Dublin spin-out developing AI for hospital operations, has raised $5.5 million in venture funding, bringing its total funding to $12.3 million.
The company combines privacy-preserving sensors with robots and AI tools to help hospitals reduce administrative workloads, coordinate services and treat more patients.
The funding round was led by Locke Health, with participation from VTC Ventures, the EIC Fund, CommonKind and NovaVector Holdings. Existing investors ACT, Atlantic Bridge and Enterprise Ireland also participated, alongside a number of strategic angel investors.
Hospitals face growing demand for care, while staff shortages and rising costs constrain their ability to respond. Yet as much as 40% of nursing time is spent on routine administrative and coordination tasks, including manual data entry, scheduling, phone calls and repeated checks on whether rooms, patients and teams are ready.
These fragmented processes divert staff from patient care and leave valuable capacity unused. Akara’s proprietary wall-mounted sensors automatically capture how clinical spaces are used. Its software acts like an air traffic controller, detecting key events and notifying staff when they are needed.
AI agents allow staff to ask questions about the data in natural language and generate reports, reducing the effort required to turn operational information into practical improvements. Conventional approaches to gathering information about hospital spaces often rely on cameras, raising privacy concerns and requiring costly, disruptive infrastructure upgrades. Akara combines thermal sensing with edge AI to address these barriers. Its sensors use thermal data to understand activity without capturing detailed visual images of patients or staff, while the AI required to interpret that data runs directly on the device. This enables key events to be detected locally, limits the transmission of sensitive information and reduces reliance on additional computing infrastructure, making deployment simpler and more affordable to scale.
“Hospitals are under enormous pressure to do more with the people and resources they already have. We want to give staff time back and help hospitals treat more patients,” Dr Conor McGinn, co-founder and CEO of Akara, said.
He added: “To achieve that sustainably and at scale, the technology has to protect privacy, be straightforward to deploy and affordable. Combining thermal sensing with AI that runs on the device makes those goals central to how our technology works.”
The company’s approach creates a foundation for physical AI in hospitals: systems that can understand activity in the real world and help coordinate what happens next.
By connecting operational data with AI agents and robotics, Akara aims to automate a growing range of tasks, from reporting and scheduling support to coordinating activity across clinical spaces.
The company was founded by a team of engineers and scientists from Trinity College Dublin. Its founders previously gained international recognition for developing Stevie, a social robot that featured on the cover of Time magazine.
The round also includes the EIC Fund, the European Innovation Council’s venture capital arm, which invests in breakthrough European technologies.
Patryk Goron
Ltd
