Dutch AI Startup Raises €1.75M for Healthcare
Amsterdam-based Delphyr, an AI platform for medical professionals, has raised €1.75 million in a new funding round. The investment, which includes capital from the founders of Hugging Face and DEGIRO, will be used to accelerate the development of its AI agents designed to reduce administrative burdens for doctors.
Delphyr's founder and CEO, Michel Abdel Malek, is a practicing anesthesiologist who experienced the frustrations of administrative overload firsthand. This direct clinical experience is the driving force behind the company's mission to develop AI agents that give medical professionals back their time. The investment from the founders of Hugging Face, a leader in the open-source AI community, signals a strong belief in Delphyr's approach to building specialized medical AI. Hugging Face's platform is a central hub for AI development, and their founders' backing suggests confidence in Delphyr's technological capabilities. The inclusion of DEGIRO's founders in the funding round brings a wealth of experience in scaling technology platforms, albeit in the financial sector. This expertise in building robust, user-friendly digital infrastructures is crucial for a platform handling sensitive medical data and integrating with complex hospital systems. Delphyr's technology is designed as an "integration-first" platform, meaning it embeds directly into existing Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. This avoids creating another standalone application and allows clinicians to use the AI assistant within their familiar digital workspace, a key factor for adoption in busy clinical environments. The AI model powering Delphyr, known as M1, is a 7-billion-parameter model specifically trained on medical information with native support for the Dutch language. This specialized training allows it to understand the nuances of clinical language and outperform more general models on medical question-answering benchmarks. The platform is built to comply with stringent European data privacy regulations, including the EU's AI Act. All patient data is processed within Europe, addressing key security and privacy concerns for healthcare organizations. The administrative burden in the Dutch healthcare sector is a significant issue, with recent figures indicating that governance and administrative costs saw a sharp rise of 11.9% in 2024. Staff shortages are expected to worsen, making tools that improve efficiency a national policy priority. Looking ahead, Delphyr plans to expand its family of AI models to include those optimized for more specialized medical tasks. The goal is to move from a supportive co-pilot to an AI assistant capable of more advanced diagnostic support and analysis of long-term patient data.
