Dutch healthtech startup OASYS NOW won this year’s Slush 100 startup competition in Helsinki with the promise to make personalized health care accessible to everyone.
In the final run, OASYS NOW competed with two other shortlisted companies: DevAlly, an accessibility startup, and Mohana, a platform that helps women navigate perimenopause. The three teams shared a focus on human impact, with compelling pitches that also touched on their backstory — in OASYS NOW’s case, a very personal one.
An oasis within healthcare
Pitching on the Founder Stage during the finals, Iranian-born entrepreneur and self-described computer nerd Nima Salami told the jury how the startup was inspired by his mom, a chronic and rare disease patient whose doctors didn’t have enough time to look for clinical trials for her constantly. Meanwhile, his now co-founder Sara Okhuijsen struggled to find patients that would fit the criteria of her research projects.
While OASYS NOW’s impact for patients is undeniable, it is on the research and pharmaceutical side that its business case lies. According to Salami, 85% of clinical trials are canceled or delayed because of patient recruitment problems, costing pharma companies and hospital trial sites tremendous amounts of money.
Recruiting patients faster requires addressing the fact that most clinical data is unstructured; but unlocking this needs to be done in a privacy-preserving manner. “This is the most sensitive data that we have, so you can’t just simply build an OpenAI wrapper,” Salami cautioned. He and Okhuijsen envision OASYS NOW as a cybersecurity firm — but one that will make personalized medicine a reality.
Putting money to good use
For OASYS NOW, just like for its 2023 predecessor Faircado, winning Slush’s annual competition comes with a big prize: €1 million in equity from investment firms Cherry Ventures and General Catalyst. That’s no spare change, especially considering that only startups that raised less than €2 million in equity fundraising could apply.
It certainly helped that Salami knew how to put the capital to good use. When one jury member asked him what he would do with €1 million, he shot back his response without hesitation: He knew exactly who to hire, both on the technical side and on the clinical side, with a range of advisors that the startup hadn’t been able to afford yet.
There’s more to OASYS NOW’s journey than hiring. The startup also plans to onboard 150 trial sites from hospitals that can benefit from its ability to speed up patient recruitment, he told Sesamers. Find out more about the startup’s vision and plans in this video interview:
