Recare secures €37M to digitise hospital referrals
Berlin-based healthtech startup Recare has raised €37 million to scale what it calls a “Booking.com for hospitals” – an AI-enabled platform that helps medical staff quickly find the right clinic, rehab or care facility for patients and manage referrals in real time.
The fresh capital will be used to expand across Europe, deepen integrations with hospital IT systems and accelerate development of AI workflows that cut paperwork and phone calls for overburdened clinicians.
AI-powered marketplace for hospital capacity
Recare operates a digital marketplace that connects hospitals, rehabilitation centres, nursing homes and outpatient providers. Instead of relying on fax, email or manual phone outreach, care teams can search available capacity, filter by specialty, insurance and location, and send structured digital referrals.
The platform uses AI algorithms to match patients with appropriate facilities based on medical needs, distance, waiting times and contractual constraints. This reduces delays in discharge, frees up beds faster and helps hospitals manage capacity planning more efficiently.
By standardising referral data and automating repetitive tasks, Recare aims to become the default infrastructure layer for care coordination in Europe’s fragmented healthcare systems.
Tackling Europe’s hospital bottlenecks
Across Europe, hospitals face chronic staff shortages, rising case complexity and mounting pressure to optimise bed usage. Legacy tools such as fax and spreadsheets slow down transfers to rehab or long-term care, creating bottlenecks in emergency departments and wards.
Recare positions its platform as a way to relieve these bottlenecks by giving discharge managers and social workers a live overview of partner facilities and automating much of the back-and-forth communication. The company says its customers report faster discharge times and fewer avoidable days in hospital.
Regulation, data security and growth plans
The startup emphasises compliance with strict European health data and GDPR requirements, employing end-to-end encryption and role-based access controls. Its AI workflows are designed as decision-support tools, keeping clinicians in full control of medical decisions.
With the new €37 million round, Recare plans to grow beyond its core German market, targeting additional EU countries where hospital referral processes remain heavily manual. As payers and providers push for more efficient, value-based care, the company is betting that intelligent, marketplace-style infrastructure will become standard in hospital operations.