Backing Asterix: Enabling Healthcare Abundance
Healthcare Demand is Infinite
There is near-infinite demand for services that can conveniently get and keep people healthy. But these services are rate-limited by the availability and cost of the clinicians delivering them. Despite the obvious benefits – fewer avoidable hospital admissions, a healthier population generating more tax revenue – rising NHS usage and spending is viewed as a national failure. Unsurprisingly, the healthcare sector runs on a scarcity mindset and rationing is deliberately baked into the operating model.
The story plays out in the numbers. The UK has fewer doctors per person than most other OECD countries. The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan predicts a shortfall of 15,000 full-time equivalent GPs by 2036. Over half of patients say it’s hard to get through to their GP, and 40% were not offered an appointment of their choice. It’s not a system that’s about to run out of demand.
But does that calculus change now that AI can make clinical knowledge nearly free? Already, OpenAI claims 40m people use ChatGPT for health questions every day and start-ups like Doctronic & Lotus have raised big to provide the ‘AI GP’. The dominant tech narrative has obsessed with job replacement and is now facing the consequences.
In healthcare we think that framing is particularly flawed (see Hinton on radiologists). Without rehashing the lump of labour fallacy or Jevons Paradox: there is no version of the future where the NHS needs fewer clinical hours, and no version where AI quietly displaces the clinicians delivering them. The constraint is, and will remain, deployable human capacity.
Scarcity in Abundance
As one commodity floods the market, whatever sits adjacent to it tends to become micro-scarce: relationally rare, specifically because the abundant thing is now everywhere. Often cited, when the printing press made printed text cheap, handwritten manuscripts became the more valuable object.
So play out healthcare AI. If clinical reasoning, documentation, summarisation and protocol-following become increasingly abundant, cheap, automatable then what becomes micro-scarce?
A few candidates:
- GMC registration. There are only so many doctors with the legal right to practice in the UK. As clinical knowledge gets cheaper, the right to practice gets more valuable. For questions of health, patient & regulator preference is physician-verified and fully auditable.
- NHS-grade clinical governance. The ability to operate inside a regulated workflow is genuinely hard, slow to build, and gets more valuable, not less. Do DPO sign-off, CQC compliance, deep integrations into unstructured clinical records like EMIS and SystmOne, the audit trail etc. excite you?
- The patient relationship. A registered list, continuity of care, the doctor who knows your history, hands-on treatment, surgery. Human skill premium in personal relationships will prevail across industries.
The constraint shifts from clinical knowledge (which is being commoditised) to the legal, institutional and human assets that surround it.
Paging Asterix
After both navigating serious health conditions of their own, Julian Titz and Max Thilo founded Asterix in 2024 to build the workforce layer for modern healthcare, starting with primary care. A vision only possible by pioneering the regulatory framework that makes it possible to deploy GMC-registered, including NHS-trained GPs, based abroad.
Today, Asterix provides remote GP services to UK healthcare providers supported by DoctorOS, their clinical operating system, which integrates with EMIS and SystmOne. Their service combines industry-leading governance with access to global clinical talent and clinical-grade AI to get back clinical time for the system, whilst saving costs.
Asterix GPs now support practices serving 250,000 patients with time-consuming clinical admin and telephone consultation tasks. They’ve also built a proprietary global talent network of 400+ clinicians.
Asterix are the only platform who can combine: industry-leading clinical governance (the slow, hard, regulated bit), unique access to global clinical talent (the supply Britain doesn’t currently have a way to use), and clinical-grade AI (the compounding productivity layer on top).
If clinical capacity is the binding constraint on every developed-world health system (and it is), then the company that can make capacity fungible across borders, augmented by AI, and accountable to NHS standards is building the most valuable piece of infrastructure in healthcare.
There is no version of the future where Britain doesn’t need more clinical hours. Asterix is one of the only credible ways of getting them.
We are very excited to be backing Julian Titz and Max Thilo and the entire Asterix Health team by leading their £2.1m pre-seed round.