Circe, the digital platform connecting women to therapist-led online group therapy, has been awarded £100,000 by Innovate UK through the Founders Factory Biomedical Accelerator. The news comes less than a year after Co-Founder Claudia Radu took home the top prize in the Medical Devices and Therapeutics category at Women's Health Week Europe 2025, and the momentum hasn't slowed since. The funding will be used to build out the AI infrastructure that makes delivering therapy groups at scale operationally viable.
The problem Circe is solving
Over a million women in the UK are currently waiting for mental health support, facing waits of up to 18 months through the NHS or private fees that put consistent care out of reach. The bottleneck isn't demand. It's capacity.
One-to-one therapy cannot scale fast enough to close that gap. Group therapy can. Clinically proven to be as effective as individual therapy, it allows a single therapist to support up to ten times more patients at a fraction of the cost. The reason it remains underused comes down to operational complexity, matching the right people into the right groups and delivering structured programmes is time-consuming and difficult to manage manually. That is the problem Circe is built to solve.
What the funding unlocks
The £100,000 award will go towards building out Circe's platform, which automates the two functions that currently make group therapy difficult to scale: matching and programme delivery.
Circe's AI-enabled matching algorithm uses member data to form well-suited groups and tailor content to each cohort, with the goal of improving both retention and clinical outcomes. The funding enables the company to roll out the full platform, grow its distribution network, and serve its first cohorts of paying members.
As Claudia Radu, Co-Founder of Circe, explains:
"Our vision is a world in which no one goes through it alone. There is an undeniable mental health crisis in our society, and we know that delivering therapy groups at scale can help ease that burden. And it goes deeper than capacity: according to a Mind report last year, half of those seeking therapy were driven, in part, by loneliness. Somewhere along the way, the mental healthcare sector forgot what it means to be human. With Circe, we hope to root mental wellbeing back into human connection."
Where Circe is now
The company has an MVP and has spent the past six months on user validation, running two test groups across different therapy themes and formats. 92% of participants self-reported an improvement in their mental health. The team is now building out the full platform ahead of a consumer launch, and is actively testing insurers and employee assistance programmes as distribution channels.
The Innovate UK award marks Circe's first significant external funding milestone, and follows its selection for the Founders Factory Biomedical Accelerator in November 2024, just four months into the company's journey.
