Trinity spinout Akara raises $5.5 million to bring privacy-preserving AI to hospitals

Posted on: 11 November 2026

Akara combines privacy-preserving sensors with robots and AI tools to help hospitals reduce administrative work, coordinate services and treat more patients.

The round was led by Locke Health, with participation from VTC Ventures, the EIC Fund, CommonKind and NovaVector Holdings, alongside existing investors ACT, Atlantic Bridge, Enterprise Ireland, and a number of strategic angel investors.

The Akara founding team (left to right): Dr Conor McGinn, Cian Donovan, Niamh Donnelly, Michael Cullinan, Eamon Bourke.

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.

Akaraʼs proprietary wall-mounted sensors (below) 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.

Automatically capturing how hospital spaces are used can provide valuable insights, but conventional approaches for obtaining this data using cameras raise privacy concerns and often require costly, disruptive infrastructure upgrades.

At the heart of Akaraʼs technology is a combination of thermal sensing and edge AI that addresses these barriers. Its sensors use thermal data to understand activity without capturing detailed visual images of patients or staff, while all the AI needed 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.

Dr. Conor McGinn, co-founder and CEO of Akara, and an assistant professor in Trinity’s School of Engineering, said: “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. 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.ˮ

Akaraʼs 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 reliable operational data with AI agents and robotics, the company 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. Akara is building on that experience to bring sensing, AI and robotics into everyday hospital operations.

The new funding round brings together investors with deep roots in healthcare, including Locke Health, VTC Ventures and CommonKind. Locke Health is led by healthcare executives with experience at Cerner and Oracle Health, while VTC Ventures is part of the Virginia Tech Carilion ecosystem, which includes the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and Carilion Clinic. The round also includes the EIC Fund, the European Innovation Councilʼs venture capital arm, which invests in breakthrough European technologies.

Patrick Brennan, Managing Director of Locke Health, said: “Our team brings deep experience in healthcare commercialisation and a clear understanding of what hospitals need to adopt new technology. Akara stands out for its potential to deliver a compelling return on investment without placing heavy demands on hospital budgets, infrastructure or staff. We believe it could be a disruptive force in healthcare, and weʼre excited to help the team turn that potential into widespread adoption and measurable impact.ˮ

James Ramey, Managing Director of VTC Ventures, said: “Hospitals need AI that can deliver practical improvements without adding significant cost or integration complexity. The progress in ambient documentation offers an encouraging example, and we see substantial potential in extending that intelligence to activity across clinical spaces. Akara makes this more accessible through thermal sensing and on-device AI, addressing critical privacy concerns while creating a pathway for robots to support teams with physical tasks.ˮ

With technology already deployed in hospitals across Ireland, the UK and the U.S., Akara will use the funding to accelerate hospital adoption, expand its operations and engineering teams in Ireland, and advance its AI agents across a wider range of healthcare applications.

The funding marks a step towards its broader ambition: enabling hospitals to translate operational intelligence into automation that improves everyday care.