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Niamh Donnelly on Akara’s ‘grand vision’, access to healthcare and issues around inclusivity in the start-up landscape.
“It’s just as special” the second time around, says Niamh Donnelly, the co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) at Irish health-tech Akara. The company just made it to Time Magazine’s best inventions list for 2025 under the medical and healthcare category.
In 2019, the start-up’s robot Stevie shot to fame as a Time Magazine cover star (also making it to the best inventions list that year). The AI-powered robot is tasked with caring for elderly people at care homes.
But the start-up then was a research group ready to spin out of Trinity College Dublin. This time though, they were recognised for their commercial capabilities, says Donnelly. “We’re up there with other companies like Apple and Nvidia. We’re a real company with revenue.”
Automation to make healthcare efficient
One of the 300 best inventions this year, according to Time Magazine, is Akara’s AI sensor, which cuts down on wasted time in hospitals by tracking and analysing activities in operating rooms.
Operating theatres waste more than two hours a day from inefficiencies, and nurses spends around 30 to 40pc of their daily allocated work hours just on record-keeping, the start-up’s data says. Akara hopes to tackle that with its sensor.
The start-up’s small AI-powered device, which is fitted in the operating room – much like a security camera – doesn’t just record activities in a room. It is linked to a hospital’s scheduling system and can track when patients are brought in, when procedures begin and end. It can also send reminder notifications to medical staff.
The data it collects is transferred to Akara’s back-end, which can then be accessed by staff, who can better schedule procedures to reduce inefficiencies.
However, Donnelly explains that Akara’s sensors do these tasks in a privacy-safe manner. Firstly, it records operating theatres using thermal imagery instead of regular colour videos. This is “one of the reasons” for their Time Magazine listing this year, Donnelly says.
“It’s really difficult to have machine learning algorithms that can take information from thermal imagery,” she explains.
Second, it uses ‘AI at the edge’, “a very hot topic right now”, according to Donnelly. To put it simply, this means that the sensor runs the inference on the device and only sends the results to Akara’s back-end.
On top of this, the start-up’s UV cleaning robot called Violet cleans and decontaminates four times faster than human-led teams, Donnelly says. When used in conjunction with the sensor, operating theatres save time.
‘Grand vision’
Akara’s “grand vision” is to help save healthcare workers time by automating manual tasks so they can treat more people, Donnelly says. The start-up is backed by Enterprise Ireland, the European Innovation Council and European Investment Bank.
“In many cases, parts of healthcare are the last to innovate,” Donnelly says. “If we can improve how efficient hospitals are – we can get more patients in”, and this could directly result in improving access to healthcare, she adds. “It’s just something that every person has – should have – the right to.
“In a lot of cases – even in first-world countries – it’s difficult to get access to healthcare.”
The start-up deployed Violet to disinfect areas in Irish hospitals during the pandemic. More recently, it launched the robot in UK’s Friarage Hospital (where it has been renamed to Dereck by the hospital staff).
Its AI sensor – launched last year – has been deployed in an ambulatory surgery division in Los Angeles, and the start-up has more launches planned in both the US and Europe.
But moving over to the US is “kind of a controversial” topic right now, Donnelly tells me. The start-up’s initial focus has been Europe, but the US “made sense in terms of deployment and sales” past their initial launches in their home ground, she adds.
“They’re a more privatised market and actually in some cases are more likely to work with start-ups,” she says. And there’s also more capital moving around for start-ups to tap into, she adds.
Loosened reins on inclusivity
Earlier this year, Akara won the Irish leg of the KPMG Global Tech Innovator contest, making its way to the final round this November, where it will be up against winning innovations from 21 countries for the overall award. Donnelly’s excited for the competition, she tells me.
In 2022, she won the EU Prize for Women Innovators under the Rising Innovator category, which recognises promising inventors under the age of 35. In 2023, she bagged the Irish Tatler Women of the Year award for STEM.
And last year, Akara was listed in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe ranking, while also winning the best newcomer award at the Infection Prevention Society Conference for its decontamination robots.
However, despite her many wins, Donnelly says people often assume she’s a recruiter at Akara or that she doesn’t have a technical background, highlighting issues around inclusivity in her sector. Being “typecast”, as she puts it, “can bring in some insecurities”.
“I think we’ve made progress over the past three or four years”, but it “might have slowed down a little bit recently”, Donnelly says. “We’ve put our foot off the gas a bit [globally].”
Women founders struggle with funding issues. In Ireland, the value of the average deal made by women-led companies last year amounted to €3m – half of the average raise for all Irish tech start-ups.
Donnelly says that the issues could stem from venture capitalists’ inherent bias against women, to women underestimating themselves and demanding lower funding to begin with. Europe’s first femtech unicorn Flo Health has an all-male founding team, she points out.
We are “oscillating”, she says, between pushing for inclusivity and relaxing when there’s sight of some improvement. Instead, “we should be pushing harder … going up in terms of effort”.