Temse, 23 March 2022 - Belgian Cascador Health has just completed an important funding round. Together with the founders, Belgian parties Qbic, Volta Ventures and Theodorus and the Swiss healthcare provider Hirslanden AG are investing 3.4 million euros in the promising start-up, with a view to further validating the data platform and continue European expansion. With its unique data platform, Cascador Health, which recently also acquired CORTS AG, a similar Swiss player formerly owned by Hirslanden AG, enables the secure disclosure of medical data by third parties in order to better exploit their potential and improve healthcare.

Healthcare providers and institutions such as hospitals dispose of an enormous amount of datasets, with valuable information from patient records or hospital laboratories, pharmacy and billing data. All these medical data constitute an important source of knowledge for improving the quality and performance of healthcare and are of immense value with regard to numerous research questions, both within academic circles and in life sciences. However, due to a number of practical barriers, such as compliance, this potential remains largely unused.

Cascador Health has therefore developed a unique platform that makes it possible for third parties to consult and valorize medical data in a privacy-compliant, secure and transparent manner. After an initial capital round by the founders in early 2021, they are now investing another €3.4 million in the promising start-up together with the Belgian funds Qbic, Volta Ventures and Theodorus and Swiss healthcare provider Hirslanden AG.

“In the United States, solutions for data consultation have been around for quite some time. The difficulty in Europe is that each country has different technical, legal and economic dynamics that all need to be incorporated. This is very complex, but we now have the right technology, financial resources and business model to support hospitals in this,” says Philip Taillieu, CEO of Cascador Health. “This investment will allow us to further validate the product, strengthen the team and scale up our activities in Belgium and Switzerland, underlining our ambition to become a one-stop shop for European hospital data in the short term.” Previously, Cascador Health had already established itself in Germany, the Netherlands and France.

Dream team

Through this new funding round, the group of investors confirm their confidence in what they perceive as a very strong operational team, led by Philip Taillieu, previously co-founder and co-CEO of Be Mobile nv, which has since been acquired by Proximus.

Steven Leuridan, Partner at Qbic: "This multidisciplinary team, with experienced people from the medical, pharmaceutical and big data sectors, has all the right qualities to help tackle what is an important social challenge. Their experience will make the difference in this issue, which is extremely complex from a legal, medical and technical point of view."

Koen De Waele, Venture Partner at Volta Ventures, strongly believes in the focus of Cascador Health: “By focusing on the compliant disclosure of medical datasets in different countries, Cascador Health immediately brings added value to parties who can use the data recurrently for the development and improvement of medicines and medical technology.”

Pierre-Antoine Binard, CFO of Hirslanden AG, acknowledges the need for a European player: “As strange as it may seem, the international exchange and use of data in healthcare is still very much in the starting blocks. Cascador Health can provide the sector with a much-needed acceleration, for the benefit of both patients and industry.”

Adrien Van der Borght, Investment Manager at Theodorus, concludes: “The problem in the medical sector is not the lack of data, but the accessibility for drug development, improving treatment and learning from practice. This is the added value Cascador Health will provide.”