NHS-adjacent ambition is meeting a Cardiff tool for routing clinical AI. Aventail, a Tramshed Tech startup formed in 2025 and formerly called Locai, has won money from the Welsh Government to build a layer that governs where a model executes and which data it can see.
Money comes from a Welsh scheme, SMART Flexible Innovation Support, that moves local ideas toward market. The department kept the amount private.
For a hospital or clinic, the question is concrete. Once a clinician pastes notes into a chatbot, the record leaves the building, and nobody on staff can say which vendor’s servers now hold it. Aventail positions software in that gap, so an administrator can keep a query on local hardware or deliberately send it outside.
Joseph Ward, chief executive and head of product, argues no organization should surrender custody of its records simply to gain AI capability. He links the product to AI sovereignty, the principle that a country needs its own infrastructure to take part in the AI economy under its own rules.
Welsh policy already uses that language. The national AI Plan for Wales pairs uptake with safe and transparent practice, and related programs fund skills and AI Growth Zones. Adam Price, the minister covering enterprise, called the grant a route from Welsh ideas to working services and tied it to a goal of halving the productivity gap with the rest of the UK.
Ward founded the company with Saif Al-Ibadi, holds backing from Fuel Ventures, and now intends to test the system before commercial rollout.
Governance is the bottleneck for agentic clinical tools. A layer that proves where each request ran, and keeps identifiable data inside a controlled perimeter, answers the question procurement teams currently cannot.
