The global venture capital landscape in 2025 and 2026 has witnessed a pronounced polarization. While macroeconomic pressures have forced a sharp reset in capital intensity for early-stage health technology startups, later-stage funding has increasingly concentrated in a select group of heavily capitalised, vertically integrated platforms. This trend culminated in the announcement that Stockholm-based preventative diagnostics firm Neko Health raised $700 million in a Series C

Europe has quietly become one of the most productive regions on earth for building health and medical technology companies of genuine scale. Over the past decade a cohort of founders has turned the continent's structural disadvantages, fragmented markets, multiple regulators, conservative public payers, slow procurement, into the very foundations of durable, defendable businesses. This guide examines ten of them in depth.