The race is intended to replace a new generation of health software in order to replace Legacy hospital systems, which in some cases may not have been updated for decades. A startup from Munich, Germany called Aries Has ambitions to build a new type of end-to-end management system that bends into more modern tools with AI and cloud services. On Thursday, it announced 30 million euros in Serie A Financing when it gains dynamics.
Sequoia leads the round of his office in London. Investors from Avelios’ Saatgut round also take part, including high-tech start-up funds, revent and individual investors.
The startup does not reveal any rating, but the round comes to the heels of Avelios that have become impressive – everything with only 5 million euros in funds. So far, according to Avelios, Avelios has registered 12 customers, all on the home market of Germany, including one of the largest private hospital chains, Sana Kliniken AG; The Hospital of the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and the Hanover Medical School hospital.
“I think we were pretty efficient,” CEO Christian Albrecht told Techcrunch. “We have a really good engineering team and a team of 11 doctors here.”
Albrecht, who co -founded the company with CTO Nicolas Jakob and Chief Medical Officer Sebastian Krammer, said in an interview that the plan should use the financing in order to further develop their system and break into more markets. It discusses with a hospital chain in Spain and says it also looks at France and Great Britain
Covid beginnings
Avelios pursues a soil approach for the world of health systems that aimed at a market that has previously been largely based on salty implementations, which serves specific purposes and therefore had to be specially integrated to work together (and possibly could never work together so well.
But like a health problem can start small before it becomes too, Avelios did not know how much scope it would build.
As Albrecht (see illustration on the left with Jakob and Krammer), Krammer had worked as a doctor during the Covid 19 pandemic when the creaking nature of the German health system was remained.
“He ran through hospitals and spent almost all the time to count patients by hand and then report the results to the authorities by hand,” said Albrecht. Krammer then advised Jakob, from whom he knew beforehand how he could possibly build something up to improve reporting in order to gain better insights into emerging trends.
“Nico (Jakob) is a software engineer and a quite quite expert for deep learning,” he continued. “And they tried it. They carried out very promising AI research and tried to expand this research, but they quickly discovered, like many other people, that they could not provide the data they need with outdated systems of hospitals to work to take up their AI system . “
Albrecht was an old friend of Jakobs – they had built a former company together – he was brought with them to help them organize more about how to build something usable. They quickly realized that the remedy of one thing made one of the other and so on – again similar to a health problem.
“We were faced with a very important decision,” he recalled. “Should we either treat the” symptoms “and build a point solution above the existing chaos over the existing IT systems, or do we actually treat the basic cause for it and build a completely new hospital information system?”
They made a big call, he said and made themselves for the latter. And then in the second step, after making this detour, you are uniquely positioned to make all the unusual AI things at the top because you have structured data and you can integrate AI solutions. “
And so it took years, but Avelios finally built up a system that is for all administrative areas of end-to-end: It includes honor (electronic health records), billing, clinical records and laboratory results, patient portal and environments for researchers and environments and environments People who work in different departments or institutions to work together.
In addition to the wake-up call of COVID-19 (which in Germany itself has a government’s funding thrust in order to update systems), there were some other significant shifts that have Avelios country talks and then have to do. with health service providers.
The first of which was a change of direction for the probably largest incumbent competitor. SAP -one of the largest providers that dominate the Erbe -T IT market (and other industries) -was on the way, the ERP business (Enterprise Resource Planning) of $ 30 billion in a cloud services -Architecture. This has caused it to support long -term, point -specific solutions for certain industries, including healthcare, and contribute to the fact that it has been helped.
More than 1,000 hospitals that use the Legacy systems from SAP must therefore change the providers when upgrading. (SAP recommends Avelios as a transition partner, among other things, and Albrecht said they are working on getting into a pole position in this flow of recommendations.)
The second is the big push for AI. As in many other industries, health care is not only pushed in AI solutions. It also asks about them. However, you cannot drive effective AI applications without your data being used in a state and useful – structured, interoperable – and legacy systems are usually not created for it. This becomes a further abundance for updating.
Investor attention to pragmatic victories
Squoia’s attention began through an introduction of Revent, one of the seed investors.
“Avelios was under the radar for four years that this system built,” said Anas Biad, Sequoia’s partner, who led the investment. He said he was completely surprised to discover when he started looking for how many customers they had received even though they were so quiet. “You managed to win some of the largest private and public hospitals in Germany. We were pretty amazed and after that we sprinted very quickly. ”
Although Avelios makes a big and ambitious momentum here, it is also with a lot of pragmatism, said the investor. Hospitals will usually not turn around and tear out the entire system wholesaler to update, not least because they have to operate further, but also because of the costs.
Indeed that Cybersecurity report from 2022 – From the Society Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society found that around 73% of their systems interviewed as “legacy” among hospitals. (Unlocks 35% with Windows Server 2008; 34% using Windows 7; 25% with an older medical device operating system; 21% using an operating system for industrial control systems (21%); and (shock horror) still 20% With Windows using Windows XP;
“Some health organizations may not necessarily plan the out of these operating systems,” the HIMSS writes in the report. “Every capital has a useful life and it is important that organizations are planning for their end of life.”
Avelios’ approach was therefore to keep things modular.
“We can land with customers modularly,” said Albrecht. He explained that this could initially mean that they could provide software for the support of administrative functions for storing documentation, invoices, then the patient portal or in a different order. “Existing Legacy players cannot offer this, as they replace a monolithic system with another monolithic system and then only have the tighter option. And that’s why many of these projects go so terribly wrong. “
