Dutch start-up Oasys Now wins €1m at the 2024 Slush 100

Oasys Now competed for the final prize against Irish-based DevA11y and Mohana, a Canadian start-up.

Dutch medtech start-up Oasys Now has won this year’s Slush 100 competition, taking home a €1m equity investment from two prominent early-stage venture funds – General Catalyst and Cherry Ventures.

The winning start-up, which has developed an AI-powered clinical trial patient identification and recruitment platform, will also receive mentoring from industry leaders to scale up its business.

According to the company’s co-founder Nima Salami, a former bioinformatics researcher at the Delft University of Technology, Oasys Now’s mission is to “enable every person to leverage their unique health data to prevent or heal disease”.

Founded in 2021 by Salami – who is an Iranian refugee – and Sara Okhuijsen, an expert in DNA and precision medicine, Oasys Now is building the EU’s first AI-powered patient recruitment platform for clinical trials.

The platform consists of two products; a GRIP app that provides users personal health insights and allows them to see relevant clinical trials available to them and the ELaiGIBLE platform, aimed at hospitals and clinics which speeds up the process of finding eligible patient cohorts for clinical trials from “months to minutes”.

The AI-powered clinical trial management market is lucrative, worth nearly $1.8bn in 2024, and the market is expected to grow to nearly $5bn before the end of the decade.

Salami founded the company because of the challenges his mother faced as a refugee with chronic illness. “In every new country we arrived in, Anna [Salami’s mother] had to go through a complete re-diagnosis before receiving the recognition of her disease and the appropriate care for it,” Salami said.

“Frustrated by this experience, I set out on a mission to build a better patient journey that could help patients, healthcare providers and researchers worldwide.”

Oasys Now will use its winnings to expand its team and increase compute power for its services.

The three-year-old Dutch start-up fought for this year’s prize against Ireland-based DevA11y, a start-up working towards digital accessibility and Canadian Mohana, a platform aiming to help women better understand their perimenopausal symptoms.

A former Start-up of the Week, DevA11y aims to make building accessible products easy for businesses – opening the digital world to more people, regardless of their disabilities.

Founded in 2023 by Dóra Jámbor, Mohana is a precision platform to help women reduce the time and effort required to detect, understand and act on hormonal imbalances.

Ireland had a strong presence at Slush this year, with Enterprise Ireland taking a 24-company delegation to the event in Finland which included included Manna Drone Delivery, workplace wellbeing start-up Lua Health and data security company Binarii Labs.

Last year, Faircado, a Berlin-based ecommerce platform won the Slush 100 competition for its browser extension solution that finds second-hand alternatives for the products users want to buy.

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