Joey raises $1.4M pre-seed to make specialist paediatric care an everyday service
July 15, 2026
Joey, a regulated digital paediatric service, has raised $1.4M in pre-seed funding — roughly £1.04M — backed by Zinc, SyndicateRoom's Access EIS fund, Innovate UK and a group of angel investors, with no single lead disclosed.
The company is targeting a part of healthcare that has been conspicuously under-served. Around one in three UK GPs has any postgraduate paediatric training, waits to see a paediatrician average more than 18 weeks, and children account for some five million A&E attendances a year, a large share of which could be resolved earlier and elsewhere. Co-founder Sasha Nagarajah has been blunt about why: paediatrics gets treated as the neglected middle child of healthcare, written off as too hard and too risky to solve, even though the early years shape health for the rest of a person's life. The practical result is a parent with a worried question and two bad options — an appointment weeks away, or a search engine.
Joey's answer is to deliver care through chat. Parents build a family profile, then message about whatever has come up — a rash at bathtime, an odd cough — attaching photos or voice notes instead of describing symptoms over the phone. NHS-trained children's doctors and nurses reply, usually within the hour, between 8am and 8pm seven days a week. They diagnose, prescribe where appropriate with medication delivered to the door, and escalate to a specialist when a case warrants it, following up until the child has recovered. Families stay with the same clinical team, which accumulates the context a ten-minute appointment tends to lose. The service runs on a monthly or annual membership, with a one-off consultation at £75 for parents testing it out. Nagarajah frames the model as multiplying what a small number of specialists can cover: the platform absorbs routine care so clinicians' time lands where it is actually needed.
The company began as a WhatsApp pilot, which over ten months delivered more than 600 hours of paediatric support to over 150 families. Co-founders Nagarajah, previously in product and operations at fintechs Tide and Pave, and Dr Abhinav Bhansali, a GP with a paediatric specialty and more than eight years of clinical experience, met through Zinc's venture-building programme. Rather than positioning Joey as a wellness or triage app, they spent roughly a year pursuing full healthcare regulation — an unusual and slow path for a company at this stage. Joey is now the UK's only digital-only regulated paediatric provider, which is both a credential and a moat in a category where parents are not inclined to experiment. Distribution partnerships with nurseries and employee benefits platforms are in early development.
Zinc, which was Joey's first institutional backer, doubled down with a follow-on cheque in this round. The money goes towards deepening Joey's library of clinical protocols, expanding partnerships with healthcare providers, and progressing the company's regulatory pathway towards medical device clearance — the step that would let more of the routine work be handled without a clinician in the loop for every message. Founding engineer Chris Farrugia rounds out the early team. The round was administered through fundraising platform FounderCatalyst.
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