100 Healthcare Startups from Poland
Healthcare transactions dominate Polish ecosystem
Polish Startup Ecosystem is maturing
After a spectacular growth in recent years, we had a flat year in 2022 in the Polish startup ecosystem. I am not sure yet what 2023 will bring, but it looks like our market is finally mature enough to produce many great tech companies on a regular basis.
Did you know that Health is the biggest startup sector in Poland?
Health is the undisputed leader in our country when it comes to the number of startup financing rounds. In the years 2020–2021, it was responsible for around 15% of all startup transactions in Poland.
Did you know that the first Polish VC-backed Unicorn is a healthcare startup Docplanner?
There was a huge unofficial announcement in 2021 that we finally have the first “real” Polish VC-backed unicorn — Docplanner. You won’t find this information on Crunchbase, but Dealroom is already listing it as a “Polish private company worth €1B+”.
Map of 100 healthcare startups from Poland
As Inovo.vc focuses on seed-stage startups from CEE, we have seen a lot of healthcare startups, and we have already backed 4 of them:
- Infermedica, AI for Triage;
- Jutro Medical, a hybrid telemedicine and in-person health platform;
- uPacjenta, lab tests at home;
- Index Health, root-cause medicine for chronic diseases.
However, it wouldn’t have been possible to create such a detailed map without everyone who contributed to it by commneting on the early version on LinkedIn. Thank You!
Is your startup still missing? Add it via this form!
The map below is interactive — you can click on any logo to be redirected to the startup’s website.
Crowded Mental Health
One of the first things you notice after looking at the map is that the mental health space in Poland is pretty crowded. It is a very challenging market, and some startups like Therapify are no longer with us. During its 4 years of operations, Therapify helped over 10,000 patients, but as one of the founders explained, the company noticed the B2B opportunity too late — and B2B was taken by Mindgram and HearMe.
I’m personally most excited about startups targeting very specific niches within mental health. Calmsie is a good example of such a startup, creating a product dedicated to kids in the US.
Race in Neurology
It looks like we have at least two superstar teams in this space.
Hugo Chrost is the first Polish Thiel Fellow in its over decade-long history. His company, Solvemed, has already raised $4m since its inception in 2019 to build computer vision analytics diagnosing neurodiseases [eg. Alzheimer’s Disease].
While Solvemed works on a Software as a Medical Device (SaMD), the team at Inoko Vision has created physicial, non-invasive optical device that measures eye movement as an objective biomarker of the neurological state of the brain. The team consists of two PhDs in physics [Anna and Maciej] who have been working on this project for over 10 years, and a recent new-joiner: Jakub Lipinski, tech entrepreneur who has sold his previous company to Snowflake.
What foreign healthcare VCs think about Polish landscape?
I think we have only started scratching the surface in terms of software tools for healthcare practitioners. In the future, your average GP or dentist will have a whole suit of products helping them with admin and care delivery. While companies like Docplanner and uPacjenta have already successfully reached for the low hanging fruit by providing better discovery and scheduling as well as enabling care at home, I’m excited for the new crop of companies using AI and NLP automating away very manual tasks. Talkie.ai for example is using voicebots to help front desk staff manage appointments and allow them to focus on quality care. I see tools like this being first integrated and coordinated by digital-first, next gen GPs and we already have these coming up in the shape of Jutro Medical in Poland or Avi Medical in Germany. These will be the motherships driving healthcare innovation with everybody else eventually following.
Inovo Venture Partners backs early-stage, post-traction startups that can grow 100x. We partner up with ambitious founders like Stefan from Booksy, Maja from Zowie, or Marcin from Spacelift. We invest between €0.5–4m in startups from Poland and CEE region. Healthcare is one of our special focus areas and our efforts in this space are led by Kris.
Disclaimers:
- The map shows both VC-backed and bootstrapped companies
- All startups containing devices and hardware were assigned to groups “Implants” or “Medical Devices” — even if they were matching other categories too.
- Software Houses and companies that are already listed on Stock Exchange were excluded from the map.
- Is your startup still missing? Add it via this form!
