Barcelona-based Health Force announced Tuesday it raised €4.2 million in seed funding led by LUMO Labs, with Target Global, Calm/Storm Ventures, STEP Fund and Next Tier Ventures joining the round. The startup claims it now automates three-quarters of insurance claims at Italy's largest private hospital groups without any human touch.
The money will fund expansion into Germany, France and Spain, and the company plans to double headcount from eight to sixteen by year's end. Health Force also intends to broaden its AI-agent catalog beyond claims processing to quality reporting, clinical-trial operations and resource optimization.
The funding arrives as European hospitals grapple with what the OECD and European Commission estimate is a shortage of 1.2 million doctors, nurses and midwives. Administrative burden has become a pressure point, one that Health Force believes AI agents can relieve.
Automating the paper trail
Health Force says its agents handle more than 200,000 patient cases annually across partnered Italian hospitals. Deployments at Humanitas and Gruppo San Donato, Italy's two largest private hospital groups, now process prior authorizations, claims and regulatory filings from start to finish. Deloitte helped secure those first Italian contracts, according to TechFundingNews.
When the agents can't close a claim autonomously, roughly a quarter of cases, the software pre-prepares the file with explicit review instructions.
The agents log into legacy hospital systems using their own credentials. That design choice lets hospitals deploy the software without ripping out existing IT infrastructure, a selling point in an industry notoriously resistant to change. Health Force describes its architecture as "deterministic-first," with full traceability of every action an agent takes.
Hospitals deploy the agents in weeks and see a two-to-three-times return on investment, the company says, though it declined to provide independent verification of those figures.
Cross-border ambitions
ULS Coimbra, a public hospital group in Portugal, uses Health Force to automate SICA reporting, the country's mandatory quality-data submission framework. Germany's KHVVG reporting obligations are next on the company's list, according to Italian newswire Teleborsa.
"It also means overcoming Europe's market fragmentation: the same platform automating hospital-insurance workflows in Italy automates SICA reporting in Portugal, and aims to automate KHVVG reporting in Germany next," CEO Fadi Haddad said in a statement.
That regulatory patchwork presents both challenge and opportunity. Each European market has distinct reporting requirements, billing standards and insurance protocols. Health Force is betting it can build a platform flexible enough to handle all of them.
The founding team
Haddad and Dr. Juan Sebastián Suárez Valencia founded Health Force in Vienna in 2022. Haddad previously led business development at Medicus.ai; Suárez served as chief data officer at Teladoc France.
Target Global and Calm/Storm Ventures backed the company at pre-seed and participated again in this round. "We backed Health Force at pre-seed and are thrilled to double down," said Peter Roos, partner and CFO/COO at Target Global. "This team cracked what many called impossible: automating hospital operations inside Europe's most complex, legacy-bound systems."
LUMO Labs, an Eindhoven- and Madrid-based impact investor, led the seed round. The firm received €6 million from Spain's SETT initiative earlier this year, according to a LUMO Labs blog post.
A crowded field
Health Force isn't alone in targeting hospital administration. Parallel, a Paris-based medical-coding startup, raised approximately $3.5 million, while Stockholm's Tandem Health raised approximately $100 million for an AI clinic operating system that links billing codes and clinical documentation, TechFundingNews reported.
Across the Atlantic, the market is further along. Anterior raised $20 million at a $95 million valuation in mid-2024 to expedite prior authorizations with AI, according to TechCrunch. Cohere Health raised $50 million in early 2024 for similar automation.
In the U.S., the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT recently opened applications for grants to "accelerate the use of agentic artificial intelligence solutions in clinical care," according to a funding notice. ARPA-H awarded Tempus AI up to $9.5 million to build what it calls the first autonomous clinical AI agent in cardiology, Tempus said in a press release.
The timing may favor startups like Health Force. A European Commission expert-group report on staffing levels noted ongoing shortages across member states, with administrative work consuming hours that could otherwise go to patient care.
"Hospitals don't need another dashboard, they need the work done," Haddad said.
Health Force sells agents as a subscription service. Whether hospitals will trust AI to handle the full claims lifecycle remains an open question, but early deployments suggest at least some administrators are willing to try.
