UpHill has raised a €7m Series A to double down on the Spanish market and take its software for managing hospital care journeys into the UK.
The Lisbon-based startup, founded in 2015 by three doctors, is a platform allowing health professionals across different departments at registered hospitals to follow a patient’s journey through the healthcare system, automating some tasks to save doctors’ time.
Hospitals pay a licensing fee for using the software, paid by departments, on an annual, biannual or three-year basis.
It also enables them to offer continuous care for patients throughout their lifetime. UpHill’s founders say it’s especially effective in improving care of patients suffering from chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
“Most care orchestration platforms out there are doing mostly administrative tasks such as check-ins, claims and communications,” Eduardo Freire Rodrigues, CEO and cofounder of UpHill, tells Sifted. “We help clinicians automate clinical tasks.”
The Series A brings UpHill’s total investment to €12m and comes as digital health startups entered 2024 off the back of a difficult fundraising environment.
The round was led by Portugal’s private equity firm Explorer and the joint social impact fund of Redstone and EnjoyVenture, with previous investors Brighteye Ventures, Maze, Caixa Capital and Grupo Luz Saúde backing the company once again.
Part of the new capital will fund the automation of more tasks, says Freire.
“What we are seeing in Europe is a shift towards what we call care integration, in which more [healthcare] units are being aggregated together, and our platform allows [healthcare professionals] to track the patient towards multiple units, which also streamlines the care navigation for patients,” he adds.
Doctors can also anticipate a deterioration in a patient’s condition, and whether they’re likely to need a visit to A&E, Freire explains.
In the case of a patient set to undergo surgery, for instance, the platform would handle the anaesthetic assessment, sort patients based on their risk levels, fast-track those in most urgent need and automatically schedule all their follow-ups.
Big expansion plans
As healthcare systems come under greater pressure, partly due to ageing populations and the Covid-19 pandemic, UpHill has expanded its presence across public hospitals in Portugal, where its software covers one quarter of the Portuguese population. It is also now working with private institutions in Spain, such as the Guttmann Institute of Barcelona, which focuses on neurorehabilitation.
With the fresh capital, the company plans to open offices in Spain and the UK — where UpHill’s top goal is implementing its software in the National Health Service — and hire around 30 people, doubling its team by the end of the year.
In 2025, the company plans to expand to the DACH region and later on to the US, says Freire.
UpHill is adapting its offer to Europe and the US, as they pose different challenges, Freire adds. While in Europe the startup’s proposition is tackling long waiting lists and increasing efficiency in care, in the US it is reducing running costs for hospitals without reducing quality of care.
