Founders Factory builds and funds startups together with exceptional entrepreneurs and the world's leading companies. Created by IPO-exited founders, we offer founders capital, operational support from a team of hands-on experts, and unrivalled access to a coalition of industry-leading corporate partners. Since 2015, Founders Factory’s 450+ portfolio companies have secured 500+ pilots and commercial contracts with our partners.
Our Studio partners with entrepreneurs at day one, developing new ideas, technologies and business models into high-growth companies. In partnership with a leading global industrial healthcare partner, we are building a new portfolio of healthcare ventures.
Every hospital in Europe loses millions to a manual, error-prone coding process that hasn't changed in decades. When a patient is discharged, a trained specialist reads 20–50 pages of clinical documentation and manually translates every diagnosis and procedure into standardised codes. These codes determine how much the hospital gets paid.
In Germany, 17.5 million inpatient cases per year require manual coding. 51.5% of audited cases contain errors. €2.5–3 billion is clawed back annually by insurers through MD audits. 75% of German hospitals ended 2024 in deficit. The coder workforce — several thousand Kodierfachkräfte, each requiring 6–12 months of training at ~€42K salary — cannot scale fast enough.
We are building an autonomous AI coding agent that reads everything the coder reads, reasons from the official German coding guidelines (Deutsche Kodierrichtlinien), and enters codes into hospital systems in seconds. Our architecture reasons from the rules at inference time, not from historical patterns. Every code carries an evidence chain and a citation to a specific guideline — audit-ready by construction. When InEK publishes annual updates, we swap the guideline document. No retraining required.
US players have raised $600M+ but built for American codes and EHRs. Parallel has proven the model in France but hasn't entered Germany. We are building this for the German market first.
Find out more about the venture concept here.
The Technical Challenge
This venture sits at the intersection of three hard problems: production reasoning AI, agents operating inside legacy enterprise IT, and DSGVO-grade architecture for regulated data. The CTO owns all three.
A reasoning-LLM system that produces audit-defensible output with full evidence chains back to the source guidelines.
An agent layer robust enough to operate inside the heterogeneous, legacy IT environments that every German hospital runs.
A sensitive-data architecture that satisfies KRITIS-grade hospital IT security and DSGVO from day one — and that hospital IT directors will actually approve.
You will work alongside an incoming Founder & CEO and a corporate partner who brings deep healthcare and regulatory expertise. Your focus is technical: architecture, build, and team.
You start with more than capital. You start with hospital pilot access from day one, deep regulatory expertise from our partner, and brand credibility that opens conversations conservative hospital buyers take years to reach on their own. Specifically:
€275k of spin-out capital plus founder stipend and studio budget
Co-founder equity and full technical ownership of the venture (Founder stipends are €5,750 per month taken from the ring-fenced build budget)
A reference-site hospital pilot lined up at launch. No cold-start
A corporate partner contributing healthcare and regulatory expertise across MDR, BSI C5, and DSGVO
Expert support across product, growth, fundraising, AI/ML, design, legal, and hiring
MVP build support from full-time venture builders
6 months of deep operational accelerator post-launch
Intros to top-tier investors and a strong head start in a European market with no incumbent built for it
We are looking for a technical co-founder who has shipped production AI systems in regulated or enterprise environments and who is excited to own a hard architecture problem end-to-end:
Proven track record building production-grade reasoning systems with LLMs: orchestration, multi-step reasoning, tool use, evaluation pipelines, cost and latency control.
Strong cloud and sensitive-data architecture experience. You've built systems handling regulated data in EU-resident infrastructure. You have a strong understanding of encryption, tenant isolation, audit logging, and cross-border data transfer constraints.
A clear position on DSGVO-compliant LLM architectures and the model-quality vs. data-residency trade-off.
Enterprise integration experience: you've worked inside large organisations with long approval cycles, IT security reviews, and legacy systems.
Strong technical judgment under uncertainty. You can shape the architecture, not just execute it.
Computer-use agent experience, browser/UI automation, or comparable agent engineering work is a strong plus.
Direct MDR, IEC 62304, or BSI C5 experience is a plus, but not required. Willingness to learn it fast is.
Business-fluent German skills strongly preferred; professional English required.
Founder energy required. Either previous founding experience or a track record of ownership that exceeded your job title.
Most importantly, you are motivated by building the system that automates the most cognitively demanding administrative process in healthcare — and turns every hospital into a customer for an expanding suite of AI agents.
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