Thoreau Backs Penelope Health With $100M for Payer Policy Data
Fundraise Insider tracks newly funded startups each week and delivers verified sales leads of C-suite contacts straight to your inbox, so you reach the right people while the funding is still fresh. See pricing.
Penelope Health, a London company that runs a real-time policy intelligence platform for healthcare providers and payers, has announced $100 million in funding, or about €87 million. The money came from Thoreau along with existing backers Bertelsmann Healthcare Investments, Twine Ventures, and Seedcamp.
The announcement on September 18 also covered a partnership with Thoreau, a healthtech infrastructure platform, to build a shared layer for real-time payments and clinical rules. Penelope will put the capital toward new products aimed at making it easier for healthcare companies to work through payer requirements.
The company was co-founded in 2025 by Dr. Sohum Patel, chief executive officer, and Mattijs De Paepe, chief technology officer. Patel previously practiced in inpatient and outpatient settings in the UK‘s National Health Service at the Royal Free London and University College London hospital systems, where he watched administrative complexity get in the way of patient care. De Paepe spent nearly four years at Via Transportation building machine learning systems for its transit products.
The problem Penelope addresses is simple to describe and hard to solve. The rules that decide whether insurance covers a treatment are spread across thousands of sources, change constantly, and are difficult to interpret. Penelope turns that scattered data into a single infrastructure layer. Healthcare companies can check coverage requirements, compare policies across payers, and tighten up internal operations, with instant, structured access to payer medical coverage policies for the majority of insured Americans. One connection replaces the custom integrations and manual policy searches teams rely on today.
The platform currently covers policies for more than 200 million Americans across upwards of 15,000 procedure and drug codes.
The round fits a wider pattern of 2026 investment in healthcare infrastructure and AI tools built to cut administrative work. Comparable European rounds this year include €86.5 million for Stockholm’s Tandem Health, up to €37 million for Berlin’s Recare, and €4.2 million for Barcelona’s Health Force. In the UK, London’s Semble raised €34.7 million for its healthcare management platform and Flexzo AI took €10.3 million for agentic workforce technology.
Companies that sell to hospitals, payers, and health systems can receive verified contacts at newly funded healthcare startups every week through Healthcare Sales Leads.