UpHill, a digital health startup that develops software to guide clinical decisions and help hospitals adopt evidence-based best practices, raised a €3.5 million seed round to scale up its product within healthcare institutions worldwide. By tackling the variability of clinical practice, UpHill is improving medical outcomes and resource efficiency, and just a month ago, the company also received €1 million in EU funding to lead a R&D project on clinical pathways implementation.
Founded in 2015 by three medical doctors non-resigned with the variability of clinical practice and its impact on patients’ outcomes, the Lisbon-based startup strives to standardize clinical care through the best evidence available, support healthcare professionals’ productivity during this process, and improve healthcare quality sustainably.
Eduardo Freire Rodrigues, UpHill CEO and co-founder, explained: “Even within the same hospital, the way each person is treated heavily depends on the medical team by whom each patient is being assisted. This variability impacts patients’ outcomes and organizations’ efficiency, making it hard to understand which set of actions led to the best results and what should be optimized. Our solution works as a GPS for healthcare settings, providing real-time, evidence-based, and multidisciplinary guidance on which path should be followed by a particular patient. As a result, clinicians improve compliance with best practices easily, organizations reduce unwarranted waste, and patients’ outcomes become more predictable.”
In 2021, the technology company has quadrupled the number of active users and more than doubled the monthly recurring revenues (MRR). With the new funding, led by Brighteye Ventures and MSM (Mustard Seed MAZE),and followed on by early investors such as Caixa Capital, Luz Saúde and Bynd Venture Capital,UpHill wants to accelerate its internationalization, and hire new roles to join product and business development teams, and launch new features.
So far, UpHill has been focused on simplifying healthcare professionals’ access to accurate and actionable information to make better decisions. According to UpHill CEO Eduardo Freire Rodrigues, the upcoming times will be marked by significant and transforming advances in their product, making it automated, integrated, and useful from a patient perspective too.
Alex Spiro Latsis, partner at Brighteye Ventures, a leading VC firm focusing on startups that empower and expand the frontiers of human potential, explains why they decided to invest: “UpHill provides an innovative solution to measure and close gaps in adherence to best practices in medicine through an intuitive simulation tool, that allows healthcare professionals to train whilst continuing to perform critical services to their communities. Eduardo, himself a trained physician – and his wider team – have leveraged their deep expertise in healthcare to solve real challenges in their sector, a sector which faces new and rapidly evolving demands every day. We are delighted to support UpHill as they scale to new geographies and continue to develop their tool and team, to help healthcare professionals face their uphill challenges with confidence, every day, everywhere.”
UpHill already works with top-performing hospitals and worldwide pharmaceutical companies such as Novartis, or Pfizer, and has ongoing projects in Portugal, Netherlands, Greece, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and Norway.
