Key Takeaway
A medical doctor at Imperial built Automedica with no salary and no VC funding. 24 months after joining BiteLabs, it was acquired by Heidi ($700M+ valuation).
The Short Version
A medical doctor. A PhD at Imperial. A company built in his spare time with no salary, no VC funding, and no certainty.
Twenty-four months after joining the BiteLabs Digital Health Fellowship, Dr Ben Turner's company — Automedica — was acquired by Heidi, one of the fastest-growing clinical AI platforms in the world, now valued at over $700M.
This is the story of how it happened. In Ben's own words.
Who Is Ben Turner?
Dr Ben Turner is a medical doctor and PhD researcher at Imperial College London. Before founding Automedica, he spent the early years of his career doing what most surgical aspirants do — chasing portfolio points, writing papers, doing audits, sitting the MRCS.
He completed an Academic Foundation Programme in the vascular surgery theme at Imperial, followed by F1 and F2 rotations in surgery, and a Plastics Junior Clinical Fellowship at the Royal Free. He was, by any measure, on the surgical track.
Then something shifted.
> "I realised I didn't really enjoy operating. I'd structured the last five to seven years of my life around this. What do I do?"
His PhD supervisor offered him a lifeline — a funded project on the role of inflammation in post-thrombotic fibrosis. Ben took it. But he quickly pivoted the project toward computational methods, machine learning, Python, language models, and found something he hadn't expected.
> "I suddenly felt I could speak this other language and unlock a different toolset. Being a clinician and a coder makes you a very powerful asset in the world today."
Joining BiteLabs
In December 2023, Ben came across BiteLabs and applied. Not with a grand plan. Not with a startup idea already formed. Simply because he wanted to explore.
> "I'd heard there were some cool previous speakers, people like Annabelle Painter, Keith Grimes. I thought it could be a way into this world."
What BiteLabs gave him wasn't a business plan. It was something harder to manufacture: exposure to real-world impact.
Ben was paired with another fellow, Eva, and assigned to work with Visiba Care, a Nordic digital health company working with large-scale clinical triage datasets. Together, they analysed patient data, generated insights, and presented their findings to hundreds of people at Demo Day.
> "For the first time I saw from healthtech how much impact you can have."
The BiteLabs programme also gave Ben something practical: a working knowledge of Git, software engineering basics, and exposure to concepts like product-market fit, clinical product management, and the scale that healthtech companies can achieve.
> "If BiteLabs didn't exist, I'd still be in the lab. I don't think I would have had the confidence to step over into the tech world."
The Idea: A WhatsApp Message and a Conference Encounter
Within three months of finishing BiteLabs, Ben had started building.
His first project — a varicose vein EHR built with GPT-4, complete with OCR patient sticker recognition — didn't sell. But it taught him he could build.
His second project came from a chance meeting at his PhD with a more technical colleague, Henry. Together they built VascularBot: an AI history-taking tool for vascular surgery. They took it to a conference. Someone in the audience raised their hand.
> "You're aware, of course, that this is a medical device."
They weren't. But that moment launched their education in the MHRA regulatory landscape. They built a knowledge graph architecture on top of NHS guidelines — NICE, BNF, NICE Clinical Knowledge Summaries — and called the product Smart Guideline.
They applied to the MHRA AI Airlock regulatory sandbox. They got in.
Building Without a Salary, Without VC Money
Automedica was lean by necessity. Henry ran the model off his own GPU-equipped supercomputer and storage was handled through a Hugging Face workaround.
> "We hosted this for almost nothing. It was quite a good lesson in how to bootstrap to the absolute nines."
They turned down a 200,000 euro VC offer from a European fund. Not because the investors weren't good — Ben says they were great. But because the two-person team felt they could manage the workload themselves.
> "There are many different ways to start a company. For my co-founder and I, we were happy running things, the two of us."
They had about 30 users generating product feedback. Two PhD students doing everything — the product, the regulatory submissions, the academic work, the accounting (badly, Ben admits).
The Acquisition: A WhatsApp Message to a Founder
The path to Heidi began in a WhatsApp group — the AI and the NHS group, widely followed in the UK digital health community.
Automedica was preparing to self-certify as a medical device and needed a small amount of capital for penetration testing. Ben reached out to a few healthtech companies about an API licensing arrangement.
One of them was Heidi.
> "We just WhatsApp'd the founder. Hit it off basically."
What followed was a period of technical evaluation — comparing models, stress-testing outputs, assessing regulatory capability. Heidi had early experience with knowledge graphs. Automedica had MHRA AI Airlock credentials and a rigorous LLM evaluation framework.
The deal was, in Ben's words, an acquihire. The amount was not disclosed.
Automedica's technology has since become the foundation of Heidi Evidence, a product launched globally in early 2026, designed to deliver real-time, evidence-based clinical insights at the point of care.
What BiteLabs Actually Gave Him
Ben is direct about what the programme contributed.
> "I genuinely feel like if you hadn't brought me into the programme and paired me up with Eva and Asif and the guys at Visiba, I genuinely don't think my journey would have been this direction."
Three things stand out when Ben reflects on the BiteLabs experience:
Confidence. Not just belief in himself, but a working understanding of the space. Seeing companies like Flo Health and Accurx from the inside. Understanding product-market fit as a concept, not just a phrase.
The right kind of ignorance. "You'd never start a company if you knew all of the things required to make an informed decision about whether it's a good idea. BiteLabs gave me the bug and just enough of an idea to be a bit dangerous."
Mentorship. Asif, a Principal AI Analyst at Numan and BiteLabs mentor, gave Ben a leg up on software engineering fundamentals that Ben credits directly for his technical development.
> "I didn't love my job before. I wasn't happy in my work. And now I literally think my life is great."
Ben's Advice to Clinicians Considering the Same Path
"If you're serious, prove it. Just go out and build. There's no excuse now. Even if you can't code
there's Lovable, there are co-founder matching services, there are technical people looking for exactly the clinical vision you have." On the fear of leaving medicine: > "If you're not sure full-time clinical medicine is right for you, just try other things. Do the BiteLabs programme. It's part-time, doable alongside clinical work, you don't have to take time out. You hang out with like-minded people. And who knows
Where Ben Is Now
Ben is now at Heidi full-time, working on Heidi Evidence, the product built in part on Automedica's technology. He describes the Heidi team's clinical ethos as one of the things that drew him to the acquisition.
> "The vein of clinical blood that runs through the company is so strong. There are so many clinician coders, ex-clinicians, people who've come through consulting. I feel like we can do huge things in the space."
He's also still completing his PhD.
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*Dr Ben Turner is a BiteLabs 2024 alumnus. Automedica was acquired by Heidi in late 2025 and publicly announced in 2026. BiteLabs is the UK's largest digital health fellowship, now growing in the USA. Learn more at bitelabs.io.*
