French startup Synapse Medicine has raised a new $28 million funding round (€25 million) led by Korelya Capital. The company has built a product that helps healthcare professionals get reliable drug information and prevent medication errors.
In addition to Korelya Capital, existing investors XAnge, MACSF and BNP Paribas Development also participated in the funding round.
There are many reasons why medication can turn against a patient — drug interaction, wrong dosage, side-effects, contraindications, etc. As the world’s population is aging and drugs are becoming more and more specific, it has become harder to know for sure that you’re prescribing the right medications as a doctor or pharmacist.
There are some existing software solutions that help you with prescriptions and medication reconciliation. “It’s a hyper fragmented market. Those solutions have been around for 30 years and people aren’t satisfied with what they’re using,” co-founder and CEO Clément Goehrs told me.
Synapse Medicine uses natural language processing to analyze and classify medication information from several sources — medication documentation from manufacturers, official recommendations from health authorities, and results from research papers.
After that, the company has built a software-as-a-service platform that can be used as a standalone product or as an extension to your existing Electronic Health Record (EHR) solution.
When you want to make a prescription, Synapse Medicine can draw information from its knowledge base and identify potential issues. Every time Synapse Medicine makes a recommendation, the product tells you the source of its conclusions.
It’s all about augmenting human decisions. And the product is constantly evolving with new recommendations added every week.
The startup mostly addresses hospitals. It doesn’t want to replace EHR altogether, such as Dedalus in Europe or Epic in the U.S. Instead, Synapse Medicine believes these products are going to evolve and become platforms that aggregate several healthcare products. Synapse Medicine wants to build the best prescription assistance brick for existing EHR products.
In addition to that go-to-market strategy, Synapse Medicine also integrates with telemedicine companies. “We have dozens of telemedicine companies as clients and more than a hundred hospitals,” Goehrs said.
With today’s funding round, the company plans to grow to 150 employees by the end of the year with offices in Paris, Bordeaux, Berlin, London, New York and Tokyo. As you can see, the startup wants to turn Synapse Medicine into a global company as quickly as possible instead of focusing on specific European markets.
Image Credits: Synapse Medicine
