Startups driving medical progress often need years to achieve commercial success with their innovations. This makes events such as the Health & Life Science Venture Day organised by the Life Science Nord cluster – which brings together founders from this sector with investors – all the more important. At the third edition, ten startups were given the opportunity to pitch, with mo:re receiving the most votes from a jury and the audience.
Software solutions played a major role
A majority of the participating startups presented business models centred on software solutions, often utilising artificial intelligence. At Galagos, for instance, AI agents take on the tasks of bioinformaticians, who are otherwise hard to find in the labour market. Open Prometheus is an information platform for medical topics that promises a particularly high level of reliability. ChatDok offers several AI products, including a chatbot for the treatment of chronic conditions. anonetics is one of the few to operate without AI. With its digitalised waiting room, this startup is easing the pressure on A&E departments in over 150 hospitals that have already been secured as clients.
Invisible organs and animal-free pregnancy tests
Artificial intelligence is once again making a significant contribution to improving and simplifying vital medical procedures. ROB’E uses it for echocardiography – the ultrasound examination of the heart – and Histomography provides visual representations of tissue samples, enabling tumours to be identified more effectively. Instromeda was present as a genuine hardware startup. It builds analytical devices that are practically self-driving. Allogenetics solves a problem in transplant medicine: donated organs are often rejected by the body, but the startup makes them ‘invisible’ to the immune system. To date, animal experimentation has been necessary for the production of antibodies for medical tests. Phaeosynt offers an alternative using microalgae and is already on the market with a vegan pregnancy test.
No Health & Life Science Venture Day would be complete without mo:re
Of the ten startups taking part, two were from Hanover, and one each from Göttingen and Düsseldorf. Instromedia originally hails from Oxford and now also has an office in Hamburg. The winner was mo:re, a Hamburg-based company with close ties to the Health & Life Science Venture Day. It was already among the candidates at the very first event, and in 2025 founder Lukas Gaats spoke on a panel about the challenges facing medtech startups. This year, he won the pitch with a technology that could render animal testing obsolete. Organoids – organ-like microstructures measuring just a few millimetres – serve as a substitute. These are already in use; turnover is approaching the million mark and, following a seed round of 2.3 million euros in March 2025, the prospects for the next round of funding look good.
