Pontiro is raising capital to remove one of the NHS’s most persistent blockers to data-driven care: getting clinical data into a usable form without breaching privacy rules. The UK healthcare company has announced new funding backed by SFC Capital, Plug and Play Ventures and the British Business Bank.
The company develops the DataScrub Platform, which automates the removal of patient identifiers from medical images and clinical reports while preserving diagnostic value. Pontiro says the platform achieves 99.9% PII removal accuracy and is GDPR compliant, positioning it as infrastructure that can sit inside regulated clinical workflows rather than a point tool used ad hoc.
Deal terms and what is known
Pontiro’s funding was recently announced. The company’s backers include SFC Capital, Plug and Play Ventures and the British Business Bank.
There is a key disclosure gap. The deal facts provided cite an amount of EUR 284.25 million, while the cited source reports a seed round of £357,500 led by SFC Capital. The announcement also references non-dilutive support: Pontiro received a $481K Growth Catalyst grant from Innovate UK to support its AI evaluation platform. Without additional filings or a company statement reconciling these figures, the total financing amount and instrument mix remain unclear.
Why this round fits the market’s direction
This is a with-trend transaction: investors continue to fund “picks-and-shovels” healthcare AI infrastructure that enables data access, governance and compliance. The near-term value is operational, not theoretical. NHS trusts and research partners need de-identified datasets to support service redesign, research and AI development, but manual anonymisation creates delays, cost and risk.
Pontiro’s pitch is that automation can replace manual processing bottlenecks and reduce compliance exposure. The company says it has processed more than two million medical images, a proof point that matters in healthcare IT where pilots can stagnate and scaling across sites is often the hard part.
What Pontiro is building
Pontiro’s core product, DataScrub, targets a specific friction point: removing patient identifiers from imaging and reports while maintaining clinical utility. If performance holds in production, 99.9% PII removal accuracy combined with GDPR compliance supports broader data sharing without forcing trusts into heavyweight, bespoke governance workstreams for each dataset.
The company is also developing an AI evaluation platform, supported by Innovate UK’s Growth Catalyst grant. The grant was awarded under an AI category focused on privacy-first anonymisation tools and secure data sharing, aligning with policy attention on trusted and responsible AI.
Use of proceeds and near-term execution
According to the source, the seed funding supports scaling anonymisation capabilities and launching the AI evaluation platform. Pontiro is also focused on expanding from NHS Wales into NHS England, integrating into clinical workflows and measuring ROI.
Those priorities reflect what buyers and CIOs in healthcare increasingly demand: not just compliance claims, but evidence of clinical and operational impact. Integration into existing workflows is the commercial gate. If DataScrub sits outside core systems, adoption can remain limited to innovation teams. If it embeds into imaging and reporting processes, it becomes infrastructure.
Key questions for investors and customers
Even with strong early signals, execution risk sits in implementation and governance:
- Workflow fit: How deeply is Pontiro integrated into trust imaging and reporting stacks, and who owns the process day-to-day?
- Data governance and auditability: What audit trails, exception handling and quality controls exist when PII removal is automated?
- Commercial model: Is pricing aligned to volume (images, studies) or site-level contracts, and does it scale with procurement constraints across trusts?
- Proof of ROI: Can Pontiro quantify time saved, reduced compliance risk and faster dataset availability for research and AI development?
What to watch next
- Expansion milestones from NHS Wales into NHS England, including named trust deployments
- Evidence of durable workflow integration (PACS, RIS, reporting systems) and operational ownership
- Publication of ROI metrics and case studies that procurement teams can underwrite
- Product progress on the AI evaluation platform and how it complements anonymisation
- Clarification of total funding and how the announced figures reconcile across equity and grants