XUND increases seed funding to 8 million euros
The Austrian healthtech scale-up XUND is increasing its 6 million euros seed funding from 2022 to 8 million euros. Thieme Group, a market-leading provider of specialist medical information and digital healthcare services provider, is joining as a new investor. In addition to Thieme, existing investors MMC Ventures and MassMutual Ventures are also participating in the extension. Thieme's investment is intended to aid the development of Medical Large Language Models (MedLLMs) to enable the dynamic provision of personalized medical content. The foundation for this is formed by XUND's many years of experience in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Thieme's high-quality medical content.
The Viennese healthtech scale-up XUND specializes in developing software as a medical device (SaMD). Its Patient Interaction Suite is a digital healthcare technology that covers a patient’s entire life cycle and enables digital interactions from prevention to diagnosis and monitoring. The scale-up's B2B customers include health insurance companies, healthcare providers, pharmaceuticals, pharmacies, and digital health companies.
XUND has been collaborating with Thieme Group since 2020 to improve patient communication by strengthening health literacy and patient confidence. As part of the extension of XUND’s seed funding round from 6 to 8 million euros, Thieme has now decided to invest alongside existing investors MMC Ventures and MassMutual Ventures. The investment intends to expand the existing collaboration and accelerate the growth of digital health innovation. In addition to the synergies of the existing product portfolios of both companies, the common goal is the development of Medical Large Language Models (MedLLMs), which builds on XUND's many years of experience and NLP technology and is trained with Thieme's high-quality medical content. The aim is to combine both into large language models and thus enable the dynamic provision of personalized medical content. The partners are presenting an initial joint prototype at DMEA, Europe's leading event for digital health.
"The young team at XUND has turned innovative ideas into a user-friendly application," says Katrin Siems, Senior Executive Vice President Marketing and Sales at Thieme. "With this investment, we will benefit even more from the dynamic and outstanding technological expertise that characterizes this scale-up.”
Charlotte Barttelot, Principal at MMC Ventures, on the expansion: "We're excited to be continuing our support for the XUND team. Its API is still totally unique in this space and everything we've seen to date demonstrates its superior use of AI versus anything else in the market. This new investment from Thieme will give the team access to one of the largest proprietary data sets in Europe to further develop its leading product.”
“XUND is a market leader in developing AI tools for healthcare, and this new partnership provides access to a unique and valuable dataset to continue their development of Medical LLMs,” adds Ryan Collins, Managing Partner at MassMutual Ventures. “We’re delighted to continue supporting XUND through the next stage of growth.”
Tamás Petrovics, Co-Founder & CEO of XUND, is certain: "The use of artificial intelligence will usher in a new era in healthcare and take how individual patient data is linked to personalized and trustworthy information to an unprecedented level. We are very grateful to our investors for their trust and support in a challenging market environment. This not only strengthens our position as an innovation leader but is also an important signal for continuing our growth trajectory."
Additional information on the investors
About Thieme
Thieme is a market-leading provider of information and services that help to improve health and healthcare. With digital solutions in medicine and chemistry, Thieme supports information, communication, and documentation processes in science, education, training, and patient care. All services are directly oriented towards the benefits for their target groups – medical students, doctors, nursing staff, clinics, health insurance companies, and other professional groups in the healthcare sector. They receive exactly the information and services they need in a specific work situation or phase of life. Together with a broad network of experts and partners, the digital healthcare provider ensures that it sets the pace in terms of medical science as well as didactics and technology. The family-owned company employs more than 1,000 people worldwide who are committed to improving medicine and health every day with innovative new and further developments. For more information, visit https://www.thieme.com/.
About MMC Ventures
MMC is a leading European venture capital firm with a focus on early-stage transformative technology companies that utilise AI and data science across sectors including enterprise AI, fintech, data-driven health and cloud & data infrastructure.
Data-driven health companies MMC has backed include Current Health, Sano Genetics, C the Signs, MultiOmic, ImVitro, Agamon, PocDoc, Echo, WaWa Fertility, and Vira Health. Explore MMC’s research and other actionable insights at www.mmc.vc/.
About MassMutual Ventures
MassMutual Ventures (MMV) is a multistage global venture capital firm investing in financial technology, enterprise SaaS, healthtech, climate technology, and cybersecurity companies. With teams based in London, Singapore, and Boston, MMV manages over $1 billion in investment capital across the globe. We help accelerate the growth of the companies we partner with by providing capital, connections, and advice. With our deep expertise and extensive network, MMV helps entrepreneurs build compelling and scalable companies of value. For more information, visit www.massmutualventures.com/.
About XUND
XUND enables healthcare companies to digitize the patient journey and translate unstructured data into actionable insights. Founded in Vienna in 2018, the scale-up developed four medical modules to cover the entire lifecycle of a patient and enable digital interactions from prevention to diagnosis and monitoring. Its flagship product is an AI-powered health assistant that provides symptom and risk assessment capabilities to help navigate patients to the best point of care. The underlying database is powered by proprietary NLP models analyzing millions of medical publications. The technology is the industry's first class IIa medical device under the European Medical Device Regulation (MDR) and is utilized by market-leading insurance, pharma, and big tech companies.