Healthmate automates 100 Spanish clinics

Marcos Valera, Roberto Oliver, and Jorge Calvo co-founded Healthmate in February 2024 at the Scientific Park of Miguel Hernández University in Elche. Eighteen months later, the startup's AI-powered virtual receptionist is running the administrative layer of 100 private clinics across Spain, having processed 800,000 messages from approximately 30,000 patients.

The product sits inside WhatsApp and handles the full administrative cycle, appointment booking, confirmations, reminders, rescheduling, patient follow-up, and invoicing, without asking patients to download a separate application or create an account. When a patient cancels, the system does not log the gap and wait. It autonomously re-triggers the booking flow to fill the slot, which is the functional behaviour that separates Healthmate from standard reminder tools.

The company competes most directly with Doctoralia, the Docplanner-owned platform entrenched across 5,000 Spanish private clinics and now deploying its own AI features. In English-speaking markets, Patientdesk (YC-backed) and Penciled (YC W24) address comparable workflows for physical therapy and general outpatient care. Healthmate's structural position against Doctoralia rests on channel: WhatsApp is already the daily communication tool for Spanish patients, whereas portal-based systems require a behavioural shift that suppresses adoption in small practices.

Healthmate is built specifically for small and mid-sized private clinics, psychology, physiotherapy, general medicine, aesthetic specialties, podiatry, and nutrition practices, that lack large reception teams. For those operators, the administrative overhead of calls, manual rescheduling, and appointment confirmation represents a direct drag on clinical capacity.

In June 2025, the company closed a pre-seed round of €300,000 with participation from ENISA. The round funds a team of eight people and the current 100-clinic footprint. By May 2026, Healthmate had won the 35th Campus de Emprendedores of SeedRocket, one of Spain's most established early-stage accelerators. It has also been recognised as Best Innovative Project in Spain 2025 by CEPYME and received an award in the Emerging Initiative category at the IX Industry Awards in Spain.

The awards carry real signal in the Spanish ecosystem, raising visibility among investors and clinic buyers. The commercial question that follows is straightforward. Doctoralia's presence in 5,000 clinics gives it the data and distribution to close a WhatsApp-native gap quickly. Healthmate's path from 100 to 1,000 clinics before that happens requires capital well beyond the current €300,000 pre-seed. The SeedRocket win positions the company for a seed conversation. Whether that conversation moves fast enough is the operative variable.

What the 100-clinic milestone actually unlocks is a credible proof-of-retention data set, 800,000 messages across 30,000 patients, that turns the next fundraise into a unit-economics conversation rather than a product validation one.