Dutch startups combining education and healthcare

Healthcare and education are generally treated as separate sectors, but for a handful of Dutch startups they are two sides of the same product. They develop technology that simultaneously improves diagnoses and transfers knowledge, or that trains healthcare professionals while monitoring patients. This produces a distinctive type of company: not purely medtech, not purely edtech, but something in between.

The Dutch startup database identifies at least six companies that are explicitly active in both domains. They are spread across the country, from Groningen to Nijmegen and from Utrecht to Assen, each approaching the intersection in their own way.

Anatomy without a dissection room

The most direct example of this combination is Enatom, founded in 2022 in Groningen. The company develops an e-learning application featuring photorealistic 3D models of real bodies, designed for the training of doctors, nurses, surgeons and physiotherapists. The models can also be used in virtual reality and augmented reality.

Enatom collaborates with the Universitair Medisch Centrum Groningen for scientific content, and with the Department of Surgery at Medisch Centrum Leeuwarden and the Aletta Jacobs School of Public Health on the development of a so-called Virtual Dissection Room. The company has raised €900,000 to date, of which €400,000 came from G-Force Capital and Triade Investment for the market launch.

The approach addresses a practical problem: access to anatomical teaching materials is unevenly distributed. Students at smaller institutions or in regions without an academic hospital have less access to dissection room education. A platform that is independent of time and place and offers high visual quality reduces that gap, although the actual impact in practice has yet to be demonstrated.

Movement data as a learning tool

Moveshelf, founded in Utrecht in 2017, took a similar path from a different angle. The platform manages and visualises movement data collected in clinics and rehabilitation centres, with synchronised videos, 3D representations and gait analysis. This clinical use is accompanied by an educational function: UMCG, the Roessingh Centre for Rehabilitation and Amsterdam UMC also use the platform for annual gait analysis courses. Each course trains twenty to forty specialists, including rehabilitation physicians, orthopaedic surgeons and physiotherapists.

Moveshelf raised €1.7 million in a Series A round in 2022. The system integrates with electronic patient records, which facilitates embedding in existing hospital workflows. Here, the educational component is not a separate product but a use case that emerges from the clinical infrastructure.

AI diagnostics and academic roots

Several startups have their origins in academic research groups, which makes their connection to education partly structural. Aiosyn, founded in 2021 in Nijmegen, is a spin-off of the Computational Pathology research group at Radboudumc. The company develops AI software that supports pathologists in making diagnoses in cancer care. The research environment of Radboudumc, which also serves secondary school pupils, students and scientists, is the immediate context in which Aiosyn operates. The company has raised a total of €4.4 million, with investors including Oost NL and LUMO Labs.

Pacmed, founded through the Nationale DenkTank of 2014 and since based in Amsterdam, works on AI support for ICU capacity management and patient outcomes. The company pursues scientific validation and the dissemination of knowledge about data-driven care, collaborating with Amsterdam UMC through a ten-year partnership. Pacmed Critical was deployed at OLVG and Maasstad in November 2023. Total funding amounts to €24 million (Series A, 2021).

Informing as part of care

Cardiomo, active in Nijmegen since 2016, develops a wearable ECG patch for remote cardiac monitoring. The educational component is embedded in the product itself: the accompanying app provides explanations for patients, family members and healthcare professionals about the measured health data. The patch measures heart rate, respiration, body temperature and fall risk, and sends that data via a secure cloud to AI algorithms. Cardiomo received €977,000 in subsidies in 2021 and is accepting pre-orders for further production runs.

Valtes Care, based in Assen and emerging from conversations in 2021, focuses on informal caregivers. The app offers personalised information, practical tips and advice on regulations and local support services. Municipalities including Almere, Katwijk, Emmen and Lochem deploy the platform. Valtes won the public award at the Nationale Zorginnovatieprijs in 2024 and was also included in the KVK Innovatie Top 100 that year. For this company, providing information is not a by-product but the core of what it offers.

Parasite detection with CE marking

LEVEN VISION, founded in 2021 in Leiden, occupies a different position. The company developed the ParaScout AI system for automated detection of intestinal parasites in laboratories, with an accuracy of 98.81 percent. The system holds a CE marking under the IVDR regulation and was developed in collaboration with Erasmus MC. LEVEN VISION is listed in the database as active in both healthcare and education, but specific information on how the educational component is structured cannot be verified on the basis of available material.

What this pattern reveals about the sector

The companies in this overview demonstrate that the boundary between healthcare and education is, in practice, thinner than the sector classification suggests. Sometimes education is a deliberate second market, as with Moveshelf and Enatom. Sometimes it stems from an academic origin, as with Aiosyn and Pacmed. And sometimes it is built into the information layer of a healthcare product, as with Cardiomo and Valtes.

For investors, this means that a startup in this category may serve two end markets with a single product, which can strengthen the business case but also makes the go-to-market strategy more complex. Hospitals and training institutions have different procurement processes, decision-makers and budgets. Companies such as Moveshelf and Enatom have partly resolved this complexity by partnering with academic medical centres that act in both roles: as a clinical partner and as an educational institution. That model is attracting attention in a broader European market where healthcare and medical education are increasingly seen as communicating vessels.