9 innovative Cologne-based healthtech startups to watch out for in 2020

Healthcare systems across the world have always been under pressure; the pandemic simply multiplied it. It has also made the pre-existing challenges of healthcare systems visible to everyone. It has come to light that during the tough times, healthcare professionals were under-equipped, underpaid, and overworked.

Cologne-based healthtech startups

While these conditions vary from one country to another, this has paved the way for the potential digitalisation of the healthcare services. It won’t be an exaggeration to say that the COVID-19 crisis has boosted both the requirement and interest in such innovative solutions. Eventually, there is a high demand than ever before for ehealth or digital health. This has led to a rise in the relevant verticals including telehealth, mhealth, and health analytics.

As per a report, the global digital health market is estimated to reach $511B (nearly €435B) by 2026, which is an impressive yearly growth rate of 26%. While markets such as the US and China are leading the digitalisation of health systems, other markets have picked up the pace now.

Talking about Germany, it is one of the leading startup scenes and Berlin remains the main focus of the German startup scene. Given that the report cites that the annual public health spending of Germany is $330B (nearly €281B), here we have listed the top healthtech startups in Cologne that are worth your attention right now as sourced from Dealroom.

Cannamedical

Founder/s: David Henn
Founded year: 2016
Funding: €25.6M

Cannamedical imports medical cannabis products and sells them to pharmacies and clinical facilities. It ensures medical care for patients and improves their quality of life. The Cannamedical portfolio includes cannabis varieties, medical marijuana grinders, cannabinoid oil, and more to treat ailments such as chronic pain and cancer.

CEVEC Pharmaceuticals

Founder/s: Nicole Faust, Gudrun Schiedner, Wolfgang Kintzel
Founded year: 2001
Funding: €19.4M

CEVEC Pharmaceuticals provides cell technology for the manufacturing of bio-therapeutics from R&D to manufacturing scale. Its product portfolio comprises platform technologies for gene therapy viral sectors, vaccines, and complex recombinant proteins. CEVEC offers a solution for large-scale production of AAV vectors using producer cell lines with all essential components that are integrated into the cell. Recently, the company launched the patent-protected ELEVECTA platform, which is a new and scalable production platform for AAV gene therapy vectors.

Fasciotens

Founder/s: Frank Beyer, Gereon Lill
Founded year: 2016
Funding: €2.6M

Fasciotens is a medical tech startup that works on new devices that make it easier to close the abdominal wall and increase the possibility of survival in ill patients. This solution is an external device, which maintains the abdominal wall in a state of tension and increases the intra-abdominal volume. With early abdominal closure, there is decreased mortality, reduced duration of intensive care treatment, and minimised hospital costs.

InfanDx

Founder/s: Hans-Peter Deigner
Founded year: 2010
Funding: €5.4M

InfanDx develops a new generation of diagnostic tests for the care of neonates. It focuses on the early identification of newborns suffering from critical oxygen supply deficit during birth termed Asphyxia), which is a major cause for brain injury often followed by life long disabilitation. It requires very early application after birth, and currently, there’s no test system available to meet this crucial demand. InfanDx closes this diagnostic gap by carrying such a test system through clinical development until it is available for use in the hospital.

multiBIND biotec

Founder/s: Thomas Lisowsky
Founded year: 2005
Funding: €630K

multiBIND biotec develops solutions for disinfection and decontamination. Its technologies – bioDECONT and bioCLEAN are not toxic and are free from hazardous chemicals and solvents. The company is involved in the development of technologies, products, and patents related to operations in molecular genetics and biomedicine.

BetterDoc

Founder/s: Christoph von Dellingshausen, Donata von Dellingshausen, Nils von Dellingshausen
Founded year: 2012
Funding: NA

BetterDoc operates with the vision to enable patients to get the best possible medical treatment for their health problems. Its data analytics platform aggregates all kinds of quality data from the health system and measures outcomes with patient-reported outcomes (PROs). This way, the company routes patients to the right doctors and getsget the best possible second medical opinion, treatment, or surgery. The BetterDoc service works with leading German health insurance companies for their customers.

Rimasys

Founder/s: Marc Ebinger, Robert Holz
Founded year: 2016
Funding: NA

Rimasys is a medtech company. The company’s mission is to reinvent surgical education and enables medical science, academic, and the healthcare industry to develop and perform better implants, operations, and therapies. It improves patient outcomes at relatively lower costs. Furthermore, Rimasys provides holistic educational concepts for clinics, surgeons, and medtech companies complemented by 3D printing and virtual reality.

Mane Biotech

Founder/s: Carlos z Martínez, Samuel Jellard
Founded year: 2019
Funding: €90K

Mane Biotech has developed regenerative medicine through stem-cell technology. The company has developed a wearable device for aiding in hair regrowth and delaying hair loss. The device stimulates tissues to accelerate the body’s own mechanism to regenerate hair. The potential of stem-cell driven regeneration is beyond comprehension and Mane Biotech is specialising in this aspect.

AYOXXA Biosystems

Founder/s: Andreas Schmidt, Dieter Trau
Founded year: 2010
Funding: €11.3M

AYOXXA is a biotech company commercialising innovative technology developed at the National University of Singapore (NUS). AYOXXA’s patented technology platform is producing a new generation of biochips, which merges biology with IT. This allows the biochip to accumulate large numbers of applications measuring multiple protein markers for cancer, allergies, cardiovascular, and infectious diseases, in a single test.

Stock photo from S.Borisov/Shutterstock