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Eckhardt Weber

Venture Capital and Digital Health in Europe

Healthcare’s hardest truth for founders is also its opportunity: multiple stakeholders, misaligned incentives, and slow adoption make progress difficult—yet demographics, costs, and workforce pressure make change inevitable. Europe stands at a paradox: the best and worst time to build in digital health.

Pre-order the book

There is enough money for healthcare innovation in Europe – we just have to accept that a lot needs to be wasted to get the outcome we want.

Innovation in healthcare is rarely a clean handoff between supply and demand; the user is often not the customer, and payers decide what gets used. Funding has risen steadily across Europe—with a 2021 spike that proved anomalous—and more than ten early-stage funds now focus on digital health. Yet the growth stage remains the white spot, pushing many scale-ups toward non-European capital or a jump to the U.S. The outlook is nonetheless optimistic: determined teams are marrying tech with existing processes (from tech-enabled services to modular hospital software), and AI’s rapid acceptance—from ambient scribes to agentic support—suggests productivity gains that could finally bend costs and unlock adoption at scale.

When Capital Meets Complexity:
The Next Decade for European Digital Health

What you’ll learn

How funding has evolved in Europe—steady growth, a one-off 2021 spike, and the rise of dedicated early-stage digital health funds
Where the capital gap persists at growth stage—and why pan-European scaling is pivotal for homegrown champions
What DiGA and France’s PECAN reveal about regulation, adoption, and why hockey-stick outcomes remain rare so far
Which models investors back today—tech-enabled services, infrastructure plays, and outlier bets that fit existing workflows
Why AI’s rapid uptake (scribes, agents, automation) could define the next ten years across processes, roles, and disease areas

Eckhardt Weber is general partner of Heal Capital, an early-stage venture capital fund for HealthTech in Europe. He and his team are managing $250 AuM and have invested into 27 HealthTech start-ups since 2020. Eckhardt was building start-ups in HealthTech and FinTech before and was trained as a lawyer.