Adeline Arts and Science has backed NEX Health Intelligence, joining their €1 million pre-seed round alongside lead investor Brighteye Ventures and a syndicate of early backers. NEX is building the Infection Intelligence Platform for modern hospitals — a system that moves infection prevention from reactive surveillance to predictive action.

A growing problem with real financial costs

Healthcare-associated infections (HCAIs) affect roughly 1 in 10 hospitalised patients globally. An estimated 136 million healthcare-associated, anti-microbial resistant (AMR) infections occur annually worldwide — and the consequences of each extend far beyond the immediate clinical risk.

Each HCAI adds an estimated 7.8 excess hospital days, driving annual costs of $45 billion in the United States and an estimated €13–24 billion across Europe. A single outbreak of anti-biotic resistant CPE bacteria has been estimated to cost an NHS hospital almost £1 million over its duration — driven by closed wards, intensive environmental decontamination, and missed elective surgery revenues.

The threat from anti-microbial resistance is only increasing: European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) 2025 data shows a 60% increase in carbapenem-resistant infections since 2019. As resistance continues to rise, the financial and clinical stakes of each lapse in infection control keep climbing.

Legacy solutions are too slow

The tools most Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) teams rely on remain fundamentally reactive. Legacy systems operate entirely downstream of laboratory confirmation: an alert only fires once a positive microbiology report has been logged. By that point, the patient has already moved through the hospital, potentially seeding transmission across multiple wards.

The burden on IPC teams compounds this lag. Infection surveillance still depends heavily on manual workflows: compiling statutory regulatory reports, parsing unstructured data, piecing together contact networks by hand. Teams are spending hours building a picture of what has already happened, when they need to be acting on what is about to.

Predicting outbreaks before they spread

NEX reframes the challenge entirely: “stop chasing infections, and start preventing them”. The platform combines risk prediction, outbreak investigation, and surveillance automation into a single system that flags emergent threats while there is still time to act.

The core capability is prediction: NEX can identify at-risk patients and wards before the formal threshold for an outbreak is met. By continuously processing patient movement pathways, microbiology results, occupancy pressure and historical outbreak patterns, the platform assigns dynamic risk scores to every patient and location. IPC teams can see which patients are most susceptible, which wards are trending towards elevated risk, and where clusters are forming.

When IPC teams need to investigate, NEX reconstructs transmission networks automatically - mapping time, space, and contact data to surface connections that would otherwise require hours of manual contact tracing. This enables teams to focus preventative measures on the people who are actually at risk.

The results from hospital deployments speak for themselves: case studies showed a 68% reduction in active surveillance testing required, an 87% reduction in time spent on case review, and a 44% increase in screening compliance within four months.

Why now?

The timing reflects a convergence of pressures making the status quo untenable. AMR is not a future risk — it is a current financial liability, and it is accelerating. Simultaneously, hospitals are pushing back against alert-fatiguing, generic tools embedded in horizontal Electronic Health Record (EHR) platforms. We believe demand is shifting towards purpose-built clinical software that can demonstrably improve outcomes and reduce cost, and we view IPC as one of the clearest areas where the financial case for better software is directly legible on the balance sheet.

Compounding defensibility

One of the most persistent failure modes in health-tech AI is geographic and demographic drift - models that degrade when transplanted to new clinical environments. To build a machine learning model capable of surviving real-world clinical volatility, NEX is aggregating a heterogeneous, multi-jurisdictional dataset across diverse hospital topologies and patient populations. By deploying across distinct clinical and operational environments—ranging from the high-throughput wards in the UK, to acute care facilities in Switzerland, to military and public hospitals across South East Asia —the platform directly maps variations in local epidemiology, architectural workflows, and patient movement patterns.  We see this ongoing integration into diverse global workflows as a self-reinforcing data moat.

A team with the right to be in the room

We look for founders driven by personal imperative  - and the NEX team could not embody this more clearly. The idea for NEX was born out of the COVID-19 Pandemic.  A PhD student at the time, Dr. Ashleigh Myall (CEO) was volunteering to deliver real-time forecasts of bed and ventilator demand, while building predictive models to track the spread of antimicrobial resistance. He saw patients fighting one infection fall victim to another. He realised they were “flying blind”  and asked: “what if we could see infections coming - before they spread?”

Today, as CEO of NEX, Dr. Myall brings seven years of deep-tech research from Imperial College London, where he developed the graph-based machine learning foundations that underpin NEX's predictive engine.  

Dr. Chang Ho Yoon (CMO), an Oxford-trained clinician-scientist and infectious diseases physician, brings the clinical authority needed to navigate conservative healthcare procurement and build trust with hospital decision-makers - and the lived experience of the problem.

Together, they have the right to win, and the right to be in the room with hospital decision-makers.

Conclusion: Why we invested

Infection prevention has been stuck in a reactive posture for too long — not for lack of effort from the clinicians involved, but because the tools they have been given were never built to look ahead. NEX changes that.

We invested because the problem is large, worsening, and directly measurable in hospital financial performance. Because the solution is technically rigorous and practically grounded. Because we see a data moat that compounds with every deployment. And because the founders have the rare combination of capability and credibility to make this category-defining.

We are proud to back them.

Adeline Arts and Science is a London-based family office investing in early-stage technology companies. Adeline invested alongside lead investor Brighteye Ventures, AFI ventures, Momentous, Conception X and other angels.