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The opportunity
Healthcare-associated infections affect one in ten hospitalised patients, and cost European health systems more than €24 billion annually. The surveillance tools most hospitals use to manage this haven't kept pace with the scale of the problem; they were typically built to record and report infections, not to predict them. In most hospitals today, infection-control teams are working from lagging dashboards and manual processes, detecting outbreaks only after they've started to spread.
Antimicrobial resistance is increasing across more than 40% of pathogen-antibiotic combinations monitored by the WHO, and healthcare systems globally are facing mounting regulatory pressure to move from reactive monitoring to proactive prevention. The data needed to get ahead of infections, including lab data, ward transfers, patient movements, and prescribing records, typically already exists inside hospital systems. NEX turns that data into proactive, actionable insights to prevent the spread of hospital-associated infections.
What is NEX?
NEX Health Intelligence is an AI-powered infection intelligence platform that helps hospitals detect, predict, and prevent healthcare-associated infections before they spread. Rather than waiting for infections to show up in reports, NEX reads across patient contacts, ward transfers, antibiotic use, and lab results in real time, flagging which patients are most at risk before transmission happens. Infection-control teams receive early warnings and ranked risk scores that let them intervene before an outbreak takes hold.
The platform is built around a proprietary, graph-based prediction model developed by founder Ashleigh Myall during his PhD at Imperial College London, and validated in The Lancet Digital Health. Ashleigh co-founded NEX with Dr Chang Ho Yoon, a medical doctor and biomedical informatician trained at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, and MIT.
NEX can be deployed as a full platform or as an algorithmic module embedded into existing hospital systems, including integrations with existing surveillance systems. It is currently live across hospitals in the UK, including two NHS Trusts in London and sites in the North West of England, and a military hospital in Southeast Asia, and has already supported infection safety across more than 40,000 patients internationally.
Three things convinced us:
- Strong early validation of the accuracy of the product. Ashleigh's prediction engine has been peer-reviewed and published in The Lancet Digital Health, and in early clinical evaluations the algorithm achieved an AUC of 0.89.
- The founding team brings the right combination of expertise. Ashleigh's PhD research directly underpins the product, built on years developing ICU forecasting and patient exposure algorithms for Imperial NHS Trust during COVID-19. Chang bridges clinical credibility and technical execution in a way that matters enormously for NHS adoption.
- Antimicrobial resistance is a growing and urgent problem, and health systems face increasing financial and regulatory incentives to reduce preventable infections. NEX is well positioned to become the standard of care for infection prevention as that pressure builds.
At Brighteye, we invest in companies that augment skilled professionals with AI-driven intelligence in high-stakes environments. NEX does exactly that for infection-control teams, giving them the clarity to act earlier, allocate resources more precisely, and prevent harm that goes undetected until it's too late. We are excited to support Ashleigh and Chang alongside Adeline Arts & Science, AFI Ventures, Momentous Ventures, the Conception X Angel Syndicate, and a group of experienced industry angels.
