Anna Hledikova
SurgeryAI’s smarter scheduling turns hospitals’ existing staff and theatre time into more operations and shorter waits.
Project
SurgeryAI
URL
Year founded
2023
Business stage
Seed
High-growth sectors
Digital and Technologies
Sector
Health
Location
London
Theme
Health
Funding
Funded Award Winner
The problem and opportunity
Hospitals around the world have the same bottleneck: theatre time goes unused while patients wait months for surgery. Scheduling is still manual, run by booking teams juggling spreadsheets and Electronic Patient Record (EPR) systems built for record-keeping, not planning. Lists go out part-empty and late cancellations leave gaps nobody can fill in time. In the NHS alone, over six million people are waiting. Better scheduling is the cheapest capacity a health system can buy.
The solution and innovation
Theatre lists are currently built on guesswork. SurgeryAI learns from each hospital’s own past data to predict how long a case will take for that specific patient, then builds theatre lists with the right patients in the right order, down to individual consultants’ preferences, and helps booking teams refill cancelled slots on the fly. EPR scheduling modules record bookings, ours plans them. The system is now being piloted in the NHS.
Market and ambition
Our first market is the NHS, where two pilots are already underway. We also have a signed heads of agreement in Australia, with a first hospital site keen to go. Over three years we plan to scale across NHS trusts and prove the platform internationally: every health system has more surgical demand than theatre time.
Founder perspective
Anna is a mathematician turned AI engineer, and a DeepMind scholar with published research in medical AI. Anna’s SurgeryAI co-founder is an NHS nurse who saw the waiting list problem from both sides: as clinical staff, and as a patient who waited two years for surgery.
Women in Innovation Award
Recipient of an Innovate UK Women in Innovation Award 2025/26, receiving funding, tailored business support, and access to specialist training and networks. View all winners and highly commended applicants from the Women in Innovation cohort 2025/2026.