Health Force, the European healthtech company that develops artificial intelligence agents to automate hospital operations, has announced that it has raised €4.2 million in a seed round to expand its technology – which has already been validated in leading Italian hospitals – into other European markets. Italy, the company’s primary target market, currently boasts the most advanced application of its AI agents in the hospital sector. The round was backed by a syndicate of international investors, including Lumo Labs, Target Global, Calm/Storm Ventures and Next Tier Ventures, alongside Step Fund.
The Italian hospital system, like those in many other European countries, faces a constantly growing demand for care, often without a proportionate increase in available resources. In this context, improving the efficiency of operational and administrative processes is essential to enable hospitals to handle greater volumes and focus staff on activities with the highest added value. Health Force addresses this need with artificial intelligence agents that work alongside hospital teams and autonomously manage end-to-end processes under human supervision. The agents handle prior authorisation of treatments, claims management, regulatory and quality reporting, and other operational tasks, currently supporting over 200,000 cases a year in Italian hospitals where the solution is in use.
The platform is designed using an approach that prioritises deterministic processes and ensures full traceability of the actions carried out by agents. This enables hospitals to reduce backlogs, increase operational capacity and complete processes in a single day that previously might have taken weeks. In Italian hospitals using Health Force, three out of four cases are handled without human intervention; in the remaining cases, the agent prepares the file and alerts staff to the details requiring verification, significantly reducing processing times.
Headquartered in Barcelona and with an operational hub in Milan, Health Force is already in use at some of Italy’s leading private hospital groups, including Humanitas and the San Donato Group. The platform is also used in Portugal for monitoring and reporting on quality indicators for hospital processes.
“Health Force has transformed the way we work: our teams are now working alongside agents to manage insurance operations in a completely different way to just a few months ago. From an operational perspective, this change is structural, not incremental,” says Valeria Ingrosso, COO of Humanitas Research Hospital, in a statement.
“Hospital activity is growing year on year, whilst it is becoming more difficult to recruit the operational staff needed to support it. With Health Force staff involved in day-to-day operations, our capacity grows in line with our volumes and adapts on demand. This new model is transforming the economics of hospital management,” says Giovanni Bonora, CFO of Ospedale Galeazzi Gruppo San Donato.
“Hospitals don’t need yet another dashboard; they need the work to be done. We provide hospitals with pre-trained AI agents that access existing systems and carry out practical tasks. All agents operate on the same platform, enabling hospitals to rely on a single partner to manage a range of needs. This also helps to overcome the fragmentation of the European market: the same platform that automates processes between hospitals and insurance companies in Italy is used in Portugal for Sica reporting and is now set to automate Khvvg reporting in Germany. “This round of funding enables us to scale up: more workflows, greater implementation capacity and new markets,” says Fadi Haddad, co-founder and CEO of Health Force (pictured).
“Health Force has already proven its worth with Italy’s two leading private hospital groups. The team has an in-depth understanding of how hospitals operate and has developed a pragmatic solution that is ready to scale up from the private sector and, gradually, into the public healthcare system as well. At Step, we are working alongside the team, providing our network, market knowledge and sector expertise to strengthen this Italian base and support growth across Europe,” says Maria Imbesi, a partner at Step Fund.
“We backed Health Force during its pre-seed stage and are delighted to increase our investment to support the company’s next phase of growth. There is a huge market opportunity, a product with a solid customer base, strong commercial momentum and an exceptional team that has managed to achieve what many considered impossible: automating hospital operations within systems that are among the most complex in Europe,” says Peter Roos, partner and CFO at Target Global.
Health Force will use the funding to expand its portfolio of solutions and integrate them into further hospital workflows, including quality reporting, clinical trial management and resource optimisation. The company will also expand its engineering and delivery teams, including its operational hubs in Milan, Germany, France and Spain.
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