Arkhn SAS. (5/17/21). "Press Release: Arkhn Raises €4 Million to Lead Healthcare Institutions Towards Sovereign and Efficient Data Management". Paris.

	Organisation	Arkhn SAS
	Organisation 2	Kurma Partners (Kurma Life Sciences Partners)
	Group	Eurazeo (Group)
	Product	digital health (healthcare informatics)
	Product 2	venture capital
	Index term	Arkhn–SEVERAL: investment, 202105 first financing round €4m co-led by Kurma Diagnostics II + Newfund II
	Person	Nedellec, Anne-Sophie (Newfund 202105 Partner)
	Person 2	Belot, Benjamin (Kurma Partners 202011 Partner before Zuellig Pharma + Janssen +Alcimed)

> Newfund and Kurma Partners led this first round of financing.

> The funds raised will support Arkhn's strong growth and the deployment of its data architecture solutions in France and Europe.

> Data interoperability is critical to improve care, support research, and make hospitals more sovereign.

Arkhn, a pioneer in healthcare data interoperability, announced today that it has finalized a first round of financing of €4 million. This financing round was jointly led by Kurma Partners and Newfund, through their respective funds Kurma Diagnostics II and Newfund II, with the support of the European Commission and the public bank Bpifrance.

Founded in August 2019, Arkhn tackles the issue of accessing healthcare data. It has become critical for care facilities and the entire healthcare ecosystem: medical teams, public and private researchers, patients, medical startups and softwares. This imperative need for data sovereignty has been highlighted by the coronavirus crisis and by several government measures around the world. In France, this ambition is reflected by the implementation of “My health 2022” and the allocation of €1.4 billion - the “Ségur de la Santé” program - for a simple and secure health data sharing.

Today, health care facilities use numerous softwares in order to follow patients' hospitalization, analyze medical observations or assist practitioners during their interventions. Unfortunately, there is poor communication between these softwares and healthcare institutions do not have control over data management. The lack of interoperability and data management infrastructure generate huge costs and time-consuming work - data is often collected by hand - for all the players in the healthcare ecosystem.

To solve this problem, Arkhn harmonizes all this data within a data architecture solution based on data warehouse and Artificial Intelligence technologies. It uses the open-sourced and free interoperability standard FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), which is now a worldwide authority. This “gold standard” is used to standardize data produced by medical software, like patient information, medical observations, prescribed treatments, medical devices, or financial and administrative information.

Access to this data facilitates medical research in institutions like large-scale analyses, creation of patient cohorts, etc. It supports care teams with a more precise monitoring of patient pathways, rapid search for medical information, and encourages innovation and the implementation of multi-center projects. Finally, the data architecture deployed by Arkhn enables a drastic reduction in costs and time required to deploy new softwares.

Benjamin Belot, Managing Partner of Kurma Partners, explains: “As a fund specializing in digital health, we have long identified the challenge of accessing hospital data and its negative impact on innovation. We were impressed by the team's expertise and technological leadership in Europe. The company is developing the best tools at the best time and is already collaborating with key players to address this critical challenge.”

Anne-Sophie Nedellec, Partner of Newfund, adds: “Arkhn's strength lies in its team of experts and its hand-in-hand support with medical and IT teams. The fact that it is 100% aligned with the institutions' vision of healthcare data gives it a head start. Combined with a crisis that has accelerated awareness of the importance of data accessibility, the company can become the European leader in hospital data infrastructure.”

Corneliu Malciu, Emeric Lemaire and Theo Ryffel, Co-founders of Arkhn, conclude: “We are convinced that healthcare institutions are best qualified to administer and value healthcare data. By working hand in hand with medical and IT teams, we develop trust-based relationships with the entire ecosystem. Our commitment to bringing energies together around this major challenge and our open-source approach are part of our DNA. Newfund and Kurma support us in this committed approach and will be a great asset to support our growth in France but also throughout Europe.”

The funds raised will enable Arkhn to expand their deployment to several dozen institutions in France and Europe, and to strengthen its development teams, which already include 20 experts in data and artificial intelligence. In particular, the company is investing a significant part of its R&D in automatic language processing technologies as well as privacy protection technologies such as Differential Privacy and other anonymization and pseudonymization methods. These techniques allow remote access to medical data while respecting its security and confidentiality.

Arkhn works with medical and IT teams on the field to help them address these issues over time. “Arkhn is not a service provider like any other, it is a true partner” explains Xosé Fernandez, Chief Data Officer of the Institut Curie. And Yannick Bomy, project manager at the Reims University Hospital, added: “Arkhn has fulfilled its mission perfectly. Not only has it enabled us to be more open to current and future data standardization technologies, but it also helps us improve our technical skills”. This approach allows the company to already count among its clients numerous reference centers such as Paris Public Hospitals (APHP), Curie Institute, the Reims University Hospital, the Toulouse University Hospital, the Bergonié Unicancer Institute, the Léon Bérard Center, and the French Red Cross.

Supported by several institutional organisms such as the Digital Health Agency (Agence de Numérique en Santé) and the French Hospital Federation (Fédération Hospitalière de France), Arkhn wishes to strengthen its partnerships with the various private and public actors in the ecosystem to continue building a secure, open and collaborative future for healthcare.

***

About Newfund

Newfund is one of the few French VCs with a strong presence in the US. Since launching in 2008, they have built a community of 30 start-ups in the US and 60 in France. They invest in support of initial international development and provide long-term support to entrepreneurs. On the subscriber side, Newfund has the largest base of entrepreneurs and family offices in France for an innovation fund.

www.newfundcap.com

About Kurma Partners

Founded in July 2009 and based in Paris and Munich, Kurma Partners is a key European venture capital group specialized in healthcare, with €470 million under management, with two dedicated franchises : Kurma Biofund focused on therapeutic (current active fund KBIII) and Kurma Diagnostics focused on diagnostic and digital health (current active fund Kurma Dx2).

www.kurmapartners.com

About Arkhn

ARKHN supports healthcare institutions in the management and enhancement of their data. Currently, the lack of interoperability between medical software and the absence of infrastructure dedicated to data management hinders patient care, slows down the work of medical teams and complicates the management of healthcare institutions. By standardizing healthcare data, Arkhn addresses these constraints and enables healthcare facilities to provide better service. Arkhn deploys a data architecture based on data warehousing and artificial intelligence technologies within each institution This facilitated and secure access responds to clinical research, care and patient monitoring issues. It enables the sovereign valuation of this data with the healthcare institutions' partners (software publishers, pharmaceutical companies, healthcare start-ups).

Created in 2019, the company currently employs 20 people with expertise in data management and artificial intelligence. Major institutions like Paris Public Hospitals (APHP), Curie Institute and Toulouse University Hospital have been strong collaborators since its creation.

www.arkhn.com

Press contacts

Arkhn – Head of Marketing
Maud Bisserier / +33 (0) 7 83 57 17 10 / [email protected]

Ulysse Communication – Press Relations
Bruno Arabian /+33 (0)6 87 88 47 26 / [email protected]
Pierre-Louis Germain / +33 (0)6 64 79 97 51 / [email protected]

Record changed: 2024-03-30

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