Anya selected for prestigious NHS Innovation Accelerator

Published by

Peter Davison

Breastfeeding and parenting support app, Anya, has been selected for the prestigious NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA) programme for 2023.

Anya’s Gloucestershire-based founder, Dr. Chen Mao Davies, will become one of fewer than 100 NIA Fellows selected since the programme’s conception in 2015, following a robust assessment process involving expert clinicians, patients, and NHS commercial leads.

NIA specialists will now work with Anya – formerly known as LatchAid – to equip the company with critical knowledge, relationships and skills to scale its innovation within the NHS.

The overall aim is to increase capacity for overstretched antenatal and postnatal teams, and to improve outcomes for families in a way that is low-cost, scalable, and robust.

The UK has among the worst breastfeeding rates in the world. Nine in ten of mothers are reported to have given up breastfeeding before they wanted, citing pain and a lack of support as the primary reasons.

Anya is meeting this challenge with an innovative app that uses interactive 3D technology and Artificial Intelligence to provide breastfeeding and parenting support, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The app delivers evidence-based, expert backed support and peer communities, helping parents across 1001 days from conception through to toddlerhood.

Dr Davies, a CGI specialist who previously worked on Oscar & BAFTA award-winning visual effects for Hollywood blockbusters, Gravity and Blade Runner 2049, developed the app after experiencing her own significant physical and mental health challenges with her firstborn.

Dr Davies said, “after I became a mother, I discovered that innovation is needed in public health. It was my dream to be part of Hollywood, but I found I could do something more; I could change people’s lives. The more I spoke to women about it, the more it made me feel that this was to become my mission. If I don’t do it, who else will?”.

Anya has supported parents in over 100 countries and is the top-rated breastfeeding app in the ORCHA digital library. Through partnerships with NHS providers and commissioners, Anya is currently available to a population of over 4.3m in England.

Independent analysis of NHS pilot data has shown that users of Anya are exclusively breastfeeding at six weeks at double the English national average. During this pilot, over 60% of user demand was seen out of hours, proving the vital, complimentary support Anya provides through collaboration with established NHS health services.

The company’s growth journey has been supported throughout by Innovate UK EDGE Finance Specialist, Ed Tellwright, who helped Anya to develop a clear, compelling and credible investment proposition.

“Ed really helped me to restructure my pitch, make it punchy and follow the thought process of an investor,” says Dr Davies, “it’s proved a big boost to our investment journey, and culminated in us raising more than £1m in 2022.”

Innovate UK EDGE will continue to support as this FemTech innovator helps mums redefine their relationship with breastfeeding and early parenthood.

Peter Davison

Peter Davison is deputy editor of The Business Magazine. He has spent his life in journalism – doing work experience in newsrooms in and around Bristol while still at school, and landing his first job on a local newspaper aged 19. By 28 he was the youngest newspaper editor in the country. An early advocate of online news, he spent the first years of the 2000s telling his bosses that the internet posed both the biggest opportunity and greatest threat to the newspaper industry and the art of journalism. He was right on both counts. Since 2006 he has enjoyed a career as a freelance journalist. He lives in rural Wiltshire with one wife, two children, and three cats.