London healthcare workforce platform raises £11.4m to assist in £4bn NHS spending “crisis”

London-based healthcare workforce management platform Lantum announced it has raised $15m (approx. £11.4m) in a funding round led by Finch Capital.

Piton Capital, Samos, and US-based Cedars-Sinai Hospital also participated. Lantum is considering increasing the round size, due to significant oversubscription.

This new investment will enable Lantum to fuel its growth, increase staff count, and invest in building new products that will make it possible for the NHS to make “vital and substantial” savings to staffing costs, of which over £30m has already been achieved.

Over 30,000 clinical and non-clinical staff, and 50 per cent of GP practises in England, now use Lantum to keep essential healthcare services running.

Despite being the fifth largest employer in the world, the NHS remains heavily reliant on exorbitant recruitment agencies and fragmented staff-led initiatives, like WhatsApp, spreadsheets and messaging groups to resolve staff shortages and schedules. Lantum aims to transform this with a goal to reduce the NHS’ £4bn a year spend on temporary staffing.

During the pandemic, Lantum’s intelligent management platform has been the backbone to primary care, offering scheduling software that can rapidly locate clinicians to fill shift gaps as well as setting up more than 150 clinics across the country to deliver over 13.6m doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Lantum was founded in 2012 by Melissa Morris, an NHS Accelerator Fellow and previously a management consultant at McKinsey & Co., alongside Dr. Ishani Patel, a GP and HarnessCare EHub NWL digital accelerator clinical lead.

Melissa Morris, CEO and founder of Lantum, commented: “The NHS is in crisis. Healthcare professionals are unable to meet the current demand for care. Staff shortages are high, backlogs of patients, built up over the pandemic, are at dangerous levels, and front-line staff are experiencing extreme burnout like never before.

“Today’s cash injection will enable us to go further. Our booking volumes have more than doubled in the past 12 months, with 14,000 more clinicians onboarded. It’s essential Lantum has the capabilities to meet this demand; we need to significantly drive recruitment and bolster our digital offering.”