MedAscend Completes the Scottish EDGE Hat-trick with Top Future EDGE Award

MedAscend is proud to announce that we have been awarded the Future EDGE Award at Scottish EDGE Round 27, securing a potential £150,000 funding package to support the next stage of our growth.

Supported by Scottish Enterprise, Future EDGE recognises Scotland's most ambitious companies operating within the country's future industries, including Life Sciences, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Fintech, Industrial Biotechnology, Critical Technologies and Space.

The award represents a major milestone for our team and completes a remarkable Scottish EDGE hat-trick. Since launching MedAscend, we have now successfully progressed through all three stages of the Scottish EDGE journey, securing support through Young EDGE, Regional EDGE, and now Future EDGE, the highest-value award presented at Round 27.

For us, this recognition is about much more than funding. It reflects growing confidence in the future of healthcare education and the role that AI can play in helping institutions deliver high-quality, scalable clinical training.

Founded by University of Dundee medical students Ahmed Sharaf and Hana Woods, MedAscend was created from first-hand experience of the challenges healthcare students face when preparing for clinical practice. While simulation is one of the most effective ways to develop communication and clinical reasoning skills, access is often limited by faculty time, patient availability and cost.

MedAscend addresses this challenge by providing AI-powered virtual patient simulations that allow learners to practise realistic clinical conversations, receive personalised feedback and build confidence in a safe environment before interacting with real patients.

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"As healthcare students ourselves, we have experienced the gap between classroom learning and clinical reality. MedAscend was built to help bridge that gap by giving learners more opportunities to practise, make mistakes, receive feedback and improve."

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"Winning Future EDGE is a huge vote of confidence in our vision for the future of healthcare education. More importantly, it enables us to accelerate our mission of supporting institutions with scalable, high-quality clinical training that helps prepare learners for real-world patient care."

The funding will be invested directly into platform development, infrastructure and key hires as MedAscend continues to expand across the UK and internationally.

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"Over the past year we have worked closely with educators, examiners, clinicians and institutions to ensure MedAscend reflects how healthcare is actually taught and assessed. This award gives us the opportunity to build on that momentum."

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"The investment will allow us to enhance the platform, expand our team and support even more universities, healthcare organisations and training providers. We are incredibly excited about what comes next and the impact this can have for learners, educators and ultimately patient care."

The award comes at a pivotal time for MedAscend, following successful pilot programmes and growing interest from healthcare education providers across multiple countries. As demand for scalable simulation continues to increase, the company is focused on helping institutions provide more opportunities for learners to develop confidence and competence before entering clinical environments.

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"Congratulations to all this year's winners, and especially to MedAscend on receiving the Future EDGE award."

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"MedAscend demonstrates the strength of new ideas coming out of Scotland, using AI to help healthcare students practise realistic patient conversations, get tailored feedback, and prepare more safely for clinical care. It's a strong example of the ambitious, innovation-led businesses we're backing to help scale Scotland's high-growth potential future industries and support long-term economic growth."

We would like to thank Scottish EDGE, Scottish Enterprise, our mentors, educators, partners and supporters who have backed MedAscend throughout this journey.

This award marks an important milestone, but it is only the beginning.

We look forward to sharing more updates soon as we continue building the future of healthcare education.