Key Intelligence Insight
Doccla is not primarily a software company. It is a full-stack care delivery operator that happens to run software, and that distinction is why it wins.
Most healthtech competitors built platforms and assumed hospitals would implement them. Doccla recognized that assumption as the central failure mode of the sector and built around it. The company runs three businesses simultaneously: a software platform, a medical device logistics operation, and a CQC-registered clinical provider. That structural complexity is not overhead. It is the moat. Competitors unwilling to absorb the operational cost of that model cannot replicate the outcome, and NHS procurement knows it.
The mechanism: hospitals do not have the internal capacity to operationalize software. By owning the full implementation stack, Doccla removes the primary reason virtual ward deployments fail. The result was a 9-out-of-11 public procurement win rate in 2023, a figure the company itself describes as highly unusual for the market.
Founding Story
Martin Ratz suffered a heart attack in his mid-40s. The experience inside the hospital was thorough. Discharged, he received nothing: no monitoring, no follow-up, no technological continuity. The gap between in-hospital care intensity and post-discharge abandonment was total.
Ratz identified that gap as a product problem and set out to close it. He partnered with Dag Larsson, whose background spanned Chief Product Officer roles at a Swedish streaming service and a sports hardware startup. The pairing was deliberate. Larsson owns enterprise sales and commercial strategy; Ratz owns technology, compliance, and operations. They rarely attend the same meetings. That non-overlapping structure has held from founding through Series B.
Doccla launched in 2019. For two and a half years, the company ran entirely on revenue. No venture capital, no investor roadmap to satisfy. That constraint forced a discipline that shaped the product: build what clinicians need to operate, not what investors find compelling in a pitch deck. Larsson frames it directly: "We built our company for our users, for the payers, for the patients, and not so much for the investors. In the end of the day, that builds a better company."
The first product was software-only. It quickly became clear that software alone could not solve the problem. Connected medical devices followed, then mobile phones, then last-mile logistics to ensure patients received equipment fast. The CQC-registered clinical team, including nurses, GPs, paramedics, and consultants, came last. Each layer was added because the layer before it was insufficient on its own. That compounding build-out became the product architecture.
Product
Doccla's platform covers the full care journey: early discharge and acute recovery through virtual wards, long-term condition management for chronic disease, and proactive care designed to prevent hospital admission in the first place.
The product stack has four integrated layers:
Technology Platform. The Doccla Clinician Dashboard aggregates patient readings, tracks trends, and surfaces real-time alerts. It supports NEWS2 metrics and allows clinicians to set tailored thresholds per patient. The Patient App is designed for accessibility: large fonts, simple interface, SMS-based onboarding, multi-language support. An EHR Integration Layer connects home monitoring data directly into hospital record systems, with bi-directional data flow and real-time record updating. Integration with Oracle Cerner, as deployed across the Northwest London Virtual Hospital, is a working example: referrals and monitoring data flow without duplicating admin.
Connected Devices. Doccla supplies customized equipment boxes configured per clinical pathway: pulse oximeters, blood pressure monitors, multi-parameter wrist watches, thermometers, and pre-configured smartphones. In August 2025, Doccla launched AF monitoring capabilities through a partnership with Happitech, adding CE-marked, AI-powered photoplethysmography detection of atrial fibrillation via smartphone, without additional wearables.
Managed Services. This is where Doccla's competitive surface area is widest. The company handles patient onboarding directly, including remote device setup, a 365-day support line, and live troubleshooting. Medical device logistics runs through a partnership with Gophr, enabling same-day delivery and real-time GPS tracking. CQC-registered clinical teams monitor patient compliance, manage escalation protocols, and provide capacity support to NHS teams. Patient compliance rates exceed 95%.
Clinical Solutions. Doccla operates across acute care (virtual wards enabling early discharge and A&E avoidance), chronic care pathways (COPD, asthma, heart failure), paediatric virtual wards, and life sciences (decentralized clinical trial monitoring and real-world data collection for pharmaceutical partners).
The product is deliberately configurable. Commercial and delivery teams can respond to custom client requests without redirecting engineering resources. That flexibility allows the company to say yes more often than its infrastructure would otherwise permit.
Market, Competition & Business Performance
Market
The structural conditions driving Doccla's market are not cyclical. NHS hospital capacity runs consistently above safe operating limits. Emergency admissions pressure grows. The population of patients with long-term conditions expands. The NHS 10-Year Health Plan explicitly targets care closer to home, digital tools, and preventative models as the primary response to these pressures.
Virtual wards are the operational mechanism for delivering care at home at hospital-grade fidelity. The NHS has committed to that model. Doccla operates in over 60% of NHS Integrated Care Board regions, a distribution footprint that no competitor in the UK market currently matches.
The market extends beyond the NHS. Doccla operates across 11 European countries. Expansion into France, the DACH region, and the life sciences sector is active. In smaller markets, the company deploys software-only models to establish footprint without the overhead of building local clinical and logistics operations. In large markets, the full stack deploys.
The financial case is established. An LLR ICB evaluation published in 2025 found £3,900 saved per patient per year. A 2024 BNSSG ICB evaluation found a 34% reduction in non-elective admissions. Modelled projections show £58 million in potential costs avoided per ICB for COPD and heart failure cohorts at scale. These are not projected outcomes. They are retrospective evaluations of live deployments.
Competition
The competitive landscape fragments across two categories: software-only platforms and full-stack operators.
Software-only competitors, including Docobo, Inhealthcare, and DDM Health, offer technology but transfer implementation responsibility to the hospital. That transfer is the failure point. Hospitals without sufficient operational capacity to run a software rollout will not achieve the clinical outcomes that justify procurement renewal. Doccla's full-stack model eliminates that dependency.
Larger adjacent players, including Oracle Health and Epic, operate at the EHR layer and have expanded into virtual care tooling. Their surface area is wide. Their depth in remote patient monitoring logistics and clinical managed services is not. Integration breadth is not the same as implementation capability.
Current Health (acquired by Best Buy Health) and Health Recovery Solutions represent the US market model: venture-backed, software-led, hardware-adjacent. Their presence in NHS procurement is limited.
HomeLink Healthcare competes on the managed care services layer and presents the most direct operational overlap with Doccla's service model in the UK. The distinction is platform maturity and the depth of NHS distribution Doccla has already established.
The procurement win rate in 2023 (9 from 11 tenders) is the clearest competitive signal available. Chief Commercial Officer Tom Breeze attributes it to behaviour change on the ground: Doccla sends its own clinicians onto hospital wards to review Standard Operating Procedures, assist clinical teams, and help identify the right patients for virtual wards. That motion is expensive to replicate and difficult to package into a software contract.
Business Model
Doccla charges for pilots. The policy is categorical: no free pilots, even if the fee is nominal. The mechanism is disciplinary, not financial. A paid pilot forces the hospital buyer to establish a procurement route. A free pilot reveals that the buyer may lack purchasing authority. Doccla is willing to walk away from engagements that extend pilots rather than convert to contracts.
Revenue follows a services model rather than a pure SaaS structure. The managed services component, including device logistics, patient onboarding, and clinical monitoring, creates recurring contractual value that compounds as patient volumes grow. The configurable software layer allows the commercial team to expand scope without proportionate engineering cost.
Go-to-market motion in new geographies runs on a secured-client-first rule: no local team is built until a client contract exists. That discipline prevents the cash burn pattern of hiring ahead of revenue in unfamiliar markets.
The life sciences vertical adds a second revenue surface. Decentralized clinical trial monitoring for pharmaceutical companies uses the same platform infrastructure as NHS virtual wards. The incremental cost of serving that vertical is low relative to the platform investment already made.
Traction
Doccla raised a £35 million Series B round in late 2024, led by Lakestar, in an oversubscribed process. Investors include Speedinvest and Giant Ventures.
Scale metrics as of 2025:
2,500+ patients onboarded per month across UK and Ireland
4 million+ monitored patient days delivered to date
591,463 remote clinical assessments completed in 2025
Deployed across 60%+ of NHS ICB regions
Active in 11 European countries
Net Promoter Score of 75
Contract wins from the last 12 months reflect the growth trajectory. In April 2025, Doccla secured a contract with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde to build a 1,000-bed virtual hospital in Scotland. In July 2025, South East London ICB selected Doccla for a £3.5 million virtual ward contract alongside Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust. In August 2025, South West London ICB entered a two-year partnership for integrated remote monitoring across virtual wards and care homes. In October 2025, Doccla commenced a £1.3 million remote monitoring contract with South East London ICB focused on COPD and asthma.
Hiring trends signal strategic direction. Healthcare Services headcount grew 67% over three months. Customer Success and Support grew 19% over a year. Operations grew 17%. Engineering headcount contracted 13%. The company is scaling delivery capacity and reducing the relative weight of platform development, which is consistent with a business that has validated its core product and is now executing distribution.
The company onboarded 1 in 5 patients from IMD Decile 1 (the most deprived 10% of the population) in BNSSG data from 2024. That figure matters for NHS procurement: a virtual care provider that cannot reach low-digital-literacy, high-deprivation populations does not solve the NHS's actual problem. Doccla solves it.