Tortus was founded in 2023 by Dr. Dom Pimenta, a practicing NHS cardiologist who experienced firsthand how much of a clinician's day is consumed by documentation and administrative work rather than patient care. The company's mission is to give doctors back time by building an AI co-pilot that handles the paperwork ambiently and safely, designed from the ground up for the realities and safety standards of clinical practice rather than retrofitted from a generic productivity tool.
The product, branded OSLER, listens to the patient consultation and automatically generates clinical documentation, then goes a step further by interacting with the electronic health record to complete downstream tasks — ordering, letters, and administrative follow-ups — that normally require manual clicks. The emphasis on safety is central to Tortus's positioning: as a clinician-founded company operating in the NHS, it foregrounds clinical governance, accuracy, and the ability to slot into existing regulated workflows, which matters enormously to risk-averse health system buyers.
Tortus announced a $4.2M (about £3.3M) seed round led by Khosla Ventures in February 2024, with participation from Entrepreneur First, former NHS Chair Lord David Prior, and Eric Jang, then VP of AI at 1X Technologies, who joined as a chief scientific advisor. The backing from Khosla — an early and prominent investor in AI — gave the young company credibility, while the involvement of senior NHS figures reinforced its focus on the UK public health system as a beachhead market.
The company's go-to-market has centered on running pilots with NHS organisations, where demonstrating safe, measurable reductions in administrative time is the path to broader adoption. Tortus's target users are frontline physicians and the health systems that employ them, particularly in environments with stretched staffing where every minute returned to patient care is valuable. As a seed-stage company in a fast-moving and increasingly competitive ambient-AI category, Tortus's differentiators are its clinician-led origins, its safety-first engineering, and its deep alignment with NHS workflows — assets that are difficult for purely commercial entrants to replicate.