LDC Top 50 2026
Paul Volkaerts
Founder and CEO
Nervecentre
In 2010 Paul Volkaerts’ Wokingham company Nervecentre started to develop a collaboration technology platform for the NHS. By 2024 the platform had become a full electronic patient record (EPR) for logging and sharing patient information. Paul says Nervecentre has won 60 per cent of recent NHS contracts it bid for.
“Most EPRs are just a digitised version of the records Florence Nightingale was keeping,” he claims. “We want to be the organisation that covers the entire patient pathway, using AI and automation to make care safer and more efficient. We’ll do that in three years.” Paul forecasts a £40 million turnover next year. “When your mission is this important, you never give up.”
Our rivals began writing their code in the seventies. There’s no reason we shouldn’t become a multi-billion, multi-thousand people entity too.”
Q&A
Where did you get the idea for Nervecentre?
While working at Cisco, I spent two years on NHS projects and I got addicted to the sense of purpose it gave me. The NHS is underserved by technology yet no other organisation needs it more. I told my wife I wanted to start Nervecentre and she said, “Can we get the bathroom done first?” I said no, gave up my day job and, with no money, started building the first product. The first module was an Uber for night doctors that hospitals could use. Now we have 20 modules and a full EPR.
How competitive is this industry?
We only have two competitors but both are multi-thousand people, multi-billion-dollar companies. It’s incredibly difficult to build an EPR. You can’t just sit in your office for 10 years and write code. Everything is so nuanced in healthcare that it has to be built in partnership with a customer. Our rivals began writing their code in the seventies. We’ve done it in a third of the time. There’s no reason we shouldn’t become a multi-billion, multi-thousand people entity too.
Where does your resilience come from?
I’m from a deprived area on the west coast of Cumbria. My secondary school had about 100 people in my year group. Only five stayed on to do A-levels and only two went to university. I was one of them. Everyone had low academic expectations. When I told my father I wanted to study electronics and software at university, he said why don’t you get a job with the electricity board. I had to explain that it wasn’t the same thing. Something about that environment triggered something in me.
