Adon Health, a German health tech startup, announced the successful completion of its high six-figure pre-seed financing round. The company, founded in late 2023 by 2 former McKinsey colleagues Maximilian Schubert and Dr. med. Jonathan Apasu, is providing fast, digital and medically sophisticated access to testosterone replacement therapies as part of their bigger mission to revolutionize healthcare services and preventive medicine for men.
The startup’s first injection of capital was led by the Swiss VC fund Backbone Ventures, alongside the Atomico Angel Programme and several business angels with business building experience in the European healthcare and consumer ecosystem.
After completion of a closed-beta phase, Adon recently launched publicly, gaining significant momentum in the German market. Adon Health’s product is a vertically integrated platform for complex and underserved therapies, with a first focus on testosterone replacement therapies.
The platform enables patients to manage their entire care experience digitally and in one place, making the care experience significantly less complex and time-consuming for the patient. The platform offers access to an ecosystem of German healthcare providers and players, including laboratories, doctors and pharmacies. In its mission to provide the gold standard of digital care for men, Adon Health is supported by a medical expert board of leading scientists.
The problem of testosterone deficiency affects up to 40% of men above the age of 45, making it a healthcare issue for millions of men. While the US has made great advancements of bringing this issue into the public’s awareness it is still largely unknown and critically underserved in Europe.
“We see an opportunity to bring an enhanced healthcare offering appropriate for the 21st century to millions of patients. We aim to make handling your own health as modern and people-centric as using your iPhone. More importantly though we want to play a role in creating European-wide awareness for large, underdiagnosed healthcare issues such as testosterone deficiency and help people not only take care of their health reactively but also preventively,” said Maximilian Schubert, Co-Founder of Adon Health
Despite high numbers of testosterone deficient men, access to care is inadequate. Waiting times for therapies of over 6 months are commonplace and access to specialized doctors is not distributed equally across the country. Moreover, a therapy requires multiple initial and follow-up tests and recurring doctor visits, making it a complex journey for patients.
“During our interactions with patients we observed the grave issues complex patient journeys can cause for affected people. We are at the forefront of rethinking how millions of people in Europe receive medical care. The opportunities technology has created in the past decades is abundant. We aim to make it accessible to patients, while maintaining the highest medical standards and collaborating with all parts of the conventional healthcare ecosystem. Employing such a model for testosterone deficiency is just the beginning. Specifically with respect to more complicated patient journeys, there has been a lack of patient-centered digital innovation. We are confident in the great promise this holds for healthcare in Europe,” added Dr. med. Jonathan Apasu, co-founder of Adon Health.
According to an analysis by the German Federal Statistical Office (Statistisches Bundesamt), men have an average life expectancy of 78.3 years, which is nearly 5 years lower than that of women (83.2 years). The reasons for this are manyfold and stretch from lifestyle to utilization of healthcare. Regarding the latter astudy by the Robert Koch Institute showed that only 40% of men utilize the offered cancer screening examinations, compared to nearly 70% of women.
“We see great potential in facilitating end-to-end care online for complex and underserved patient journeys. The healthcare ecosystem has been evolving in recent years with important regulatory changes in telemedicine and record utilization rates of online services by patients. These factors create opportunities to reinvent healthcare as we know it and bring it into the digital age. Specifically in the European innovation ecosystem, male health has been a largely overlooked topic, despite the clear need for novel solutions that address the deficient health standards of men,” added Dr. Jan Claudio Muñoz, Partner at Backbone Ventures
