Healthcare Fintech Company Nelly Receives Major Financial Injection

The co-founders of Nelly Solutions are familiar with rapid sales and customer growth. Lukas Eicher and Niklas Radner worked for Klarna, one of Europe’s most valuable fintechs, for a long time. Three and a half years ago they started the medical finance company Nelly Solutions.

“Our vision is to become Europe’s largest fintech company in the healthcare sector,” announced co-founder Niklas Radner in an interview with Handelsblatt. To achieve this, Nelly is now receiving 50 million euros from investors.

This means that the company has managed a major deal right at the start of the year. Last year, the consultancy EY counted just 29 financing rounds for start-ups, each with a volume of more than 50 million euros.

The Berlin start-up offers a platform through which medical practices can process and automate everything from patient documentation to payment and billing. There are now a number of companies that help with the digitization of administration in practices.

However, Nelly also offers the processing of payment processes. With its two banking partners, Varengold and Vereinigte Volksbank Raiffeisenbank VVRB, Nelly is active in the field of invoicing.

The company buys the self-payer bills from practices and immediately transfers the money, minus fees, to the doctors. Nelly, in turn, collects the money from the patients – and has to deal with possible delays or cancellations.

According to the German Factoring Association, factoring sales in the German healthcare sector are steadily increasing. Providers in this area include BFS and the German Pharmacists and Doctors Bank – Apobank for short.

Radner does not see Nelly as a competitor to the appointment booking platform Doctolib, but rather as a complement

Nelly’s financing round is led by financial investors Cathay Innovation from France together with Notion Capital from the UK. Existing investors b2venture, Lakestar, Motive Ventures and Arc Investors are also involved.

“Our company valuation increased significantly during the financing round,” said Radner. However, he did not want to give a specific figure. The data service Dealroom estimated the valuation before the latest financing round at a maximum of 100 million euros.

Radner also does not want to publish information on revenue, but announces that revenues increased tenfold in 2024. “We now have more than two million digitally recorded patients and more than 1,200 medical practices, including many dentists, but also dermatologists, gynecologists, cosmetic and general practitioners,” said Radner.

Jacky Abitbol, ​​investor at Cathay Innovation, praised: “Nelly is ideally positioned to become the leading bank for medical practices in the future.” Jan-Hendrik Bürk of b2venture said Nelly is able to quickly introduce new features in a very highly regulated and complex market.

New money flows into expansion

“The biggest challenge was creating interfaces with existing software providers,” said Radner, who once worked in a dentist’s office for a month and a half to better understand the needs.

Now he and his team, which now has 100 members, want to further expand the product range and soon open an office in Italy to drive expansion there. “In Italy, the proportion of patients who pay for their own dental treatments is high. At the same time, there are many smaller practices,” said Radner, explaining the move into the Italian market. After that, the company could possibly move on to Spain.

More money for the healthcare system

According to EY, after a lull of several years, more money flowed into German start-ups last year. The increase was particularly high in the health sector. The sector received 958 million euros last year. The previous year it was only 445 million euros.

Nelly also benefited from this in the most recent Series B financing round, in which companies have to prove that their business model can make money. “Our growth and the growing market have convinced investors,” said Radner.

Another plus point is that Nelly is now increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) – both internally and for customers. “We use AI to automate further processes,” announced Radner. This includes a chatbot that can take on tasks and learn, as well as documentation aids for billing.

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(Featured image by Jonas Leupe via Unsplash)

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