Lifen raises $58 million to digitize the healthcare industry

French startup Lifen has raised a $58 million (€50 million) funding round. The startup has been working on digital infrastructure for the healthcare industry, starting with medical reports. 600 healthcare facilities are using the product to send and receive medical documents.

And each customer is using Lifen intensively as it represents 2 million medical documents sent to 240,000 doctors each month. Patients can also retrieve documents from Lifen directly as well.

Creadev and Lauxera Capital Partners led today’s Series C round. Existing investors Serena and Partech participated in the funding round once again.

Lifen started with messaging in the healthcare industry as the company saw an opportunity for an upgrade. Many stakeholders in the industry used to rely on good old physical letters to send medical documents. And hospitals were stuck as they couldn’t just switch to email due to data privacy.

The startup built a document platform that works with several electronic messaging protocols designed for medical records. It makes it much easier to go paperless and send reports automatically.

Lifen has also added some machine learning on top of its document product. The company tries to detect key information automatically to turn documents into structured data. For instance, the startup tries to automatically identify the name of the patient as well as sender information.

And now, the company wants to go beyond messaging with a full-fledged digital platform for the healthcare industry. Healthcare facilities can use Lifen to start using other e-health apps.

Lifen has its own app store that references all apps that work with Lifen’s user management system and connect with Lifen. This strategy has worked particularly well for Salesforce.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to hire more than 200 employees over the next 18 months. By 2025, the startup wants to work with 1,500 hospitals and 200 e-health solutions.