London-based Penelope Health raises €87 million to tackle insurance complexity
London HealthTech startup Penelope Health has secured €87 million in funding to build a platform simplifying navigation of payer coverage rules, alongside a new partnership with infrastructure platform Thoreau.
Penelope Health, a London-based healthcare technology company, has announced €87 million ($100 million) in funding. The investment was led by HealthTech infrastructure platform Thoreau, alongside existing backers Bertelsmann Healthcare Investments, Twine Ventures, and Seedcamp. Alongside the funding, Penelope announced a partnership with Thoreau to build a shared infrastructure layer for real-time payments and clinical rules.
Penelope Health builds a platform that organizes the complex and constantly shifting rules determining what treatments insurers will cover. CEO Dr. Sohum Patel said these rules are foundational to healthcare but remain opaque, fragmented, and difficult to interpret, and that Penelope was created to turn that complexity into a reliable, up-to-date reference.
The platform allows healthcare organizations to check coverage requirements, compare policies across different payers, and replace manual searches and custom one-off connections with a single unified access point. It currently provides structured access to coverage policies spanning more than 15,000 procedure and drug codes, covering over 200 million insured Americans.
Industry context
The funding round is part of a broader wave of 2026 investment in European healthcare infrastructure and AI tools aimed at cutting administrative burdens. Comparable and adjacent rounds reported this year total roughly €182.5 million, including €86.5 million for Stockholm's Tandem Health, up to €37 million for Berlin's Recare, and €4.2 million for Barcelona's Health Force. In the UK, Semble and Flexzo AI have also raised funding for related healthcare technology platforms.
Penelope was co-founded in 2025 by Dr. Sohum Patel, who previously practiced in the UK's National Health Service, and Mattijs De Paepe, who spent nearly four years building machine-learning systems at Via Transportation.
