The Cambridge clinic has regulatory approval to triage, treat and discharge patients without a human in the loop. Now it wants to do the same for hip, knee and pelvic-health conditions.

The unusual thing about Flok Health is not that an AI runs a physiotherapy appointment. It is that the NHS has signed off on the AI doing it alone. The Cambridge company holds regulatory approval to diagnose, treat and discharge patients with no clinician watching over the process, and on Wednesday it raised $12.5M to extend that model to more of the body and more of the country.

The oversubscribed Series A is led by AlbionVC, with existing backers Eka VC and Form Ventures and new investor Mercia Ventures. The money will scale Flok's back-pain service across the UK and fund expansion into three new care pathways, hip and knee pain and women's pelvic health, all due to launch in the UK this year.

What separates Flok from the broad field of healthcare chatbots is the regulatory standing behind it. The company is the first AI system in Europe to gain Class IIa medical device certification for the autonomous delivery of full care pathways, and the only digital musculoskeletal service approved as a healthcare provider by the UK's Care Quality Commission.

Together those approvals mean it can triage, treat and discharge NHS patients without human oversight, a threshold most AI health tools have deliberately stopped short of.

The product itself is an unusual piece of engineering. Rather than an animated avatar, Flok manipulates real footage of a human physiotherapist to simulate a live video appointment that responds in real time to what a patient says and does. The intent is to preserve the texture of a clinician-led session, the sense of being seen and guided, while the system underneath does the clinical reasoning.

It was built by Finn Stevenson, a former medic and rower, and Ric da Silva, a software engineer, who met at the surgical-robotics company CMR Surgical.

The case for trusting it rests on NHS data rather than laboratory claims. The service is now available to more than 2.4 million patients across eleven areas of the NHS, offering on-demand back-pain appointments with no waiting list. In one English rollout, more than 80% of patients rated the AI clinic “as good or better than” in-person physiotherapy, and the pathway saved an average of 856 hours of clinical time a month at a single trust, freeing physiotherapists for the complex cases that still need a person in the room.

That last point is the argument Flok leans on hardest, and it is a real one. Low back pain is the leading cause of disability worldwide, more than 390,000 people sit on MSK waiting lists in England alone, and the conditions are largely treatable.

Chief executive Stevenson frames the company's purpose as closing a supply-demand gap that more clinicians, hired one at a time, will never close. The new pathways would let the AI manage conditions affecting more than 20 million people a year in the UK.

The questions that attend autonomous care are not ones a funding round resolves. An AI that discharges patients without a clinician carries a different liability profile from one that advises, edge cases and missed red flags matter more when no human reviews the decision, and the model's strong NHS results so far cover back pain, the pathway it has spent the most time on. Hip, knee and pelvic-health conditions are new ground, and the regulatory approval Flok has earned is specific to what it has already proven.

For now, the company has done something most digital-health startups only promise: it has put an autonomous clinical product in front of millions of real patients inside a real health system and produced numbers that hold up. The $12.5M is a bet that what worked for back pain works for the rest. The proof, as ever in healthcare, will be in the next set of pathways rather than the last.