Céline Lazorthes and Jonathan Benhamou waste no time. For their second entrepreneurial adventure after Leetchi for the first – sold to Crédit Mutuel Arkea in 2015 – and PeopleDoc for the second – sold in 2018 to an American group -, the two serial entrepreneurs are progressing quickly and well. Even if they discover a new universe, that of health, the two stars of French Tech are currently rolling out their roadmap without a hitch. Following the success encountered in barely eleven months in the field, Resilience, their startup specializing in remote monitoring and therapeutic monitoring of cancer patients, raises an additional 40 million euros – after 5 million euros of seed from its start. creation – to deploy its solution.
Reinventing the way we treat cancer
Concretely, Resilience is a platform whose main mission is the remote monitoring of patients, in a context where between 25% and 50% of therapies, depending on the cancer, are now done on an outpatient basis. To do this, Resilience acquired, barely five months after its creation, the startup Betterise, created in 2013, and has now completed its integration. The tool “allows to’establish the profile of each patient according to numerous criteria including medical history, treatment and how the patient reacts to it“, explains Céline Lazorthes, who specifies that the purpose of this remote monitoring, which has become since January 1, 2022 an act reimbursed by Social Security, is “to be more reactive in the follow-up of the treatment and to anticipate the needs of the patient“.
This remote monitoring is done via an application, free for patients and medical staff, which is also intended as a coach for the sick. “We have completely designed a huge library of articles, videos and podcasts, produced with health professionals, to answer in an educational way all the questions that patients have about their disease, their symptoms and treatments, and the help to live with their illness with meditation sessions or food and sleep advice“, specifies Céline Lazorthes. For the time being, the startup has only developed content for breast cancer but ultimately intends to offer a library of content adapted to each disease.
Accelerate integration into hospitals in France and Europe
In less than a year of existence, Resilience has already deployed its solutions in the Côte Basque and Valenciennes hospitals, at the Les Dentellières Cancer Center (Valenciennes), at the Bordeaux University Hospital, as well as at Gustave Roussy, co-founding partner of the company and fifth cancer center in the world. “The remote monitoring application and the content added to it are an appropriate response to the explosion in the number of cancers in the world, the lack of time of medical personnel and the development of oral therapies taken at home.“, says co-founder Jonathan Benhamou.
These successes have attracted investors from both the tech world and health. The €40 million seed round is led by the French tech funds Cathay Innovation (Heetch, Drivy…) and Singular. Three European funds are also participating in the financial operation (Exor in Italy, Picus Capital in Germany and Seaya Ventures in Spain) as well as a consortium of health players including MACSF Ventures, Vivalto Ventures, Ramsay Santé and the Health Service Foundation .
The list of investors reveals more or less the ambitions and the roadmap of the startup. After 5 million in seed, these 40 million euros represent a very big first funding round, which calls for even more massive ones to become in the coming years another French unicorn in e-health after Doctolib. Especially since the presence of European investors indicates the desire of the co-founders of Resilience to quickly attack the European market, even though the marketing of their solution is barely beginning in France. “International development is essential from the start because there will be a battle around remote monitoring and we want to be the leader“, explains Jonathan Benhamou, who believes that the health sector is going through a digital shift.