Hi there,
Welcome to the 127th edition of Heartcore Insights, curated with 🖤 by the Heartcore Team.
If you missed the past newsletters, you can catch up here.
Going forward, we are bringing original insights from our investment team members about their prepared minds. Let us know what you think about the new format.
Now, let’s dive in!
Prepared Mind – Digital Health
Why is everyone lying, and AI is NOT transforming healthcare?
Many health startups in Europe don’t fail dramatically – they suffocate slowly. Not in the market, but in endless meetings with hospital IT departments. Buried under procurement cycles, compliance reviews and risk committees. Innovation doesn’t get rejected; it just runs out of oxygen.
And yet, the surface tells a different story. Europe’s health scene is booming. Talented founders are building with conviction. AI is advancing rapidly. Healthcare is an obvious target - one of the largest, most consequential industries, producing oceans of unstructured, multimodal data – of which +90% remains untouched, buried in fragmented and forgotten systems. On paper, it’s a perfect match.
So why isn’t it working?
Because nearly every team runs headfirst into the same wall: data access. Electronic health records are closed. Integrations are bespoke. And when you finally get the data, it’s chaotic – missing context, poorly structured, riddled with inconsistencies. These systems weren’t built for care; they were built for billing.
The real bottleneck today isn’t applying AI. It’s unlocking the data that’s supposed to power it.
But the issue runs deeper than access. The real missing piece is the absence of a shared infrastructure layer – the plumbing, the middleware, the connective tissue that transforms fragmented clinical data into something structured, secure and usable at scale.
Until that backbone exists, every AI application will continue duct-taping its way through the same broken infrastructure, one by one – treating data access as a moat. But let’s be clear: data access is not a moat. It’s a bottleneck.
We’ve seen this pattern before. In fintech, legacy banks once guarded consumer data like proprietary treasure. Then came PSD2. APIs became mandatory, and players like Plaid and Tink🖤 emerged. They standardised messy, fragmented data and made it accessible. That infrastructure layer didn’t just remove friction – it became the foundation for an entirely new wave of innovation.
Could Europe be heading toward its own “open banking” moment for healthcare?
A few months ago, I would’ve said no – categorically. There’s been zero incentive for EHR vendors to open up. If anything, their business models depend on keeping systems closed.
But something fundamental is changing.
In the U.S., the 21st Century Cures Act (passed in 2016) forced EHR providers to unlock patient data through standardised APIs. This regulatory shift catalysed the emergence of infrastructure and data players like Redox (+$2bn), Datavant (+$7bn) and Tempus (+$10bn) - companies that now power much of the underlying data flow across a $4T industry.
Now, Europe is starting to wake up. In March, a new regulation quietly entered into force: the European Health Data Space (EHDS). It mandates that EHRs across all EU member states provide standardised, interoperable APIs. Implementation will take years. There are more questions than answers. But if history is any guide, this could be the unlock we’ve been waiting for.
The companies that win here won’t just route data. They’ll clean it, tokenise it, orchestrate consent and deliver use-case-ready data.
Ultimately, the moat won’t be the data; it’ll be what you do with it. And that’s a good thing – for startups, for innovation and for the future of our health.
AI Enabled Investment Banks, The Capitalist
Coming to a Brain Near You: A Tiny Computer, The Wall Street Journal
Are twelve-hour days, six days a week, any way to make a living? Sifted
Ray Dalio Taught Me Everything I Needed to Know About Money — By Talking About Death, Entrepreneur
🇪🇺 Notable European early-stage rounds
Endra, a Sweden-based AI-powered, end-to-end infrastructure for MEP design, raises €3M with Norrsken - link
Ankar, a UK-based agentic AI IP platform, raises £3M with Index - link
Manex AI, a Germany-based AI platform for industrial quality and process control, raises €8M with Lightspeed - link
Volteras, a UK-based data streaming platform for EV ecosystems, raises $11.1M with USV - link
SpAItial, a UK-based startup building physics-aware AI for human-like 3D understanding, raises $13M with Earlybird/Speedinvest - link
Wordsmith AI, a UK-based legal tech startup raises $25M with Index - link
🇺🇸 Notable US early-stage rounds
Console, a Slack AI that automates IT tasks like password resets, raises $6.2M with Thrive Capital - link
Nectar Social, a social commerce platform, raises $10.6M with GV - link
Toma, an AI voice agent for car dealerships, raises $17M with A16Z - link
Superblocks, an enterprise app development startup, raises $23M with Kleiner Perkins - link
Palmstreet, a live-streaming marketplace for niche items, raises $25M with A16Z - link
Conduit, a cross-border payments platform, raises $36M with Dragonfly - link
🔭 Notable later stage rounds
Mubi, a UK-based streaming service for independent films, raises $100M with Sequoia - link
Radiant, a US-based developer of nuclear micro-reactors, raises $165M with DCVC - link
ClickHouse, a US-based open-source columnar database for fast analytics, raises $350M with Khosla/Index/Lightspeed - link
Grammarly, a Ukraine-based AI writing assistant for language, raises $1B with General Catalyst - link
Anysphere, a US-based maker of AI coding assistant Cursor, raises $900M with Thrive Capital - link
Andruil, a US-based defence tech startup, raises $2.5B with Founders Fund - link
🖤 Heartcore News
GOURMEY 🖤 can hit production costs as low as €7/kg at commercial scale. 🔥
In just the first half of 2025, FINN has added over 15,000 vehicles to its fleet. 👏🏼
Heartcore Capital’s annual offsite in France. 🇫🇷 🍷
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