Recare Secures €37M to Expand AI-Driven Hospital Operations Across Europe

Berlin-based health technology company Recare has closed a growth financing round of up to €37 million, including a €7 million option, to accelerate the rollout of its AI-powered platform for hospitals and care facilities. The round is led by DNV, which becomes Recare’s largest shareholder, with additional participation from CIBC Innovation Banking.

The funding comes at a moment of mounting operational strain across European healthcare systems, where administrative demands continue to grow while staffing levels struggle to keep pace. Recare’s focus is not on clinical decision-making, but on the less visible layers of healthcare delivery—documentation, coordination, and process control—that increasingly determine how effectively hospitals function.

From Discharge Bottlenecks to System-Wide Coordination

Founded in 2017, Recare has quietly become embedded in the German healthcare system. Its software-as-a-service platform is now used by roughly two-thirds of German hospitals, alongside more than 26,000 care providers and hundreds of rehabilitation clinics. The company originally built its reputation by digitizing discharge management and aftercare coordination, a notoriously complex process involving hospitals, rehab centers, nursing providers, insurers, and families.

Discharge delays are not merely administrative inconveniences. They directly affect bed availability, patient outcomes, and staff workload. By structuring and standardizing information flows between institutions, Recare positioned itself as a connective layer in an otherwise fragmented system.

The new funding signals a shift from targeted workflow optimization toward broader, AI-assisted orchestration across hospital operations.

An AI Agent Built for Administrative Reality

At the center of Recare’s next phase is an AI agent designed to operate as a coordination hub across existing hospital IT systems. Rather than replacing core clinical software, the agent integrates with it—extracting, structuring, and redistributing information that is often locked away in PDFs, scans, emails, and free-text fields.

Hospitals generate vast amounts of unstructured data, from referral letters to discharge summaries and handover protocols. Recare’s platform automates much of the documentation tied to these processes, while also coordinating workflows across departments. The result is less manual data entry, fewer handoff errors, and more predictable operational flow.

This approach reflects a broader shift in enterprise AI adoption: practical automation focused on relieving cognitive and administrative load, rather than ambitious promises of full autonomy.

Addressing a Structural Workforce Shortage

The timing of Recare’s expansion is closely linked to workforce realities. The European Commission estimates that Europe already faces a shortage of around one million doctors and nurses, a gap expected to widen significantly by 2030. In this context, productivity gains are not optional—they are structural necessities.

Administrative tasks consume a growing share of clinicians’ working hours, often without adding proportional value to patient care. By reallocating this burden to software, hospitals can reclaim capacity without increasing headcount. Recare’s platform is explicitly designed around this constraint, treating time as the scarcest resource in healthcare delivery.

International Expansion Beyond Germany

While Germany remains Recare’s core market, the company is now preparing to scale its platform across borders. Many healthcare systems face similar challenges: fragmented IT environments, rising administrative overhead, and acute staff shortages. Recare’s model—connecting existing systems rather than replacing them—may prove especially relevant in markets where healthcare infrastructure has evolved unevenly over time.

The new capital will be used to accelerate international deployments while further developing the AI agent’s capabilities. This includes improving interoperability, handling additional document types, and supporting more complex cross-institutional workflows.

The Broader Implications for Healthcare AI

Recare’s trajectory highlights an important trend in healthcare technology: the shift from experimental AI pilots to infrastructure-level deployment. Rather than focusing on diagnosis or treatment recommendations, companies like Recare are applying AI to the operational backbone of healthcare systems.

If successful, this class of technology could have outsized impact. Administrative efficiency affects everything from patient throughput to staff burnout and system-level costs. AI agents that quietly handle coordination and documentation may never be visible to patients, but they could fundamentally reshape how care is delivered at scale.

As healthcare systems grapple with demographic pressure and constrained resources, tools that expand effective capacity—without compromising safety or data integrity—are likely to become foundational rather than optional. Recare’s latest funding round suggests that investors and institutional partners increasingly see this layer of AI as critical infrastructure for the future of healthcare.