Tobias Lensing, the CEO and co‑founder of Ditto, has a specific moment that explains why his company exists. He accompanied a friend with stage‑4 bile‑duct cancer to an oncology appointment. Afterward, walking out of the hospital, he and his friend compared what they had each understood from what the oncologist had said. The two versions were materially different. Same consultation, same doctor, same room — profoundly different takeaways.

Lensing knew this was not an exceptional case. Research consistently shows that patients remember between 20 and 40 percent of what is communicated in a medical consultation. Emotional stress, unfamiliar terminology, information overload, and the cognitive load of sitting in a medical environment all compound to create a gap between what a doctor communicates and what a patient retains. A patient who misunderstands their diagnosis, misses their medication instructions, or fails to recognize the significance of a follow‑up recommendation is a patient who may not receive the full benefit of the care they were just given.

On May 12, 2026, Ditto announced it had raised €7.6 million to address this gap at scale. The round was led by Heal Capital, one of Europe's most active digital health venture firms, with participation from Rubio Impact Ventures and Chris Oomen, chair of Optiverder, who backed the company in earlier rounds. The funding will support Ditto's expansion into Germany, the United Kingdom, and Spain, following its launch in the Netherlands last August.

What Ditto Does and How It Works

Ditto is a free mobile application. It is free for patients. The company generates revenue through partnerships with health insurers, patient organizations, and healthcare institutions, on the basis that the same summary that helps a patient understand their care also reduces follow‑up calls, repeat explanations, and missed appointments on the clinical side.

The product works during or after a medical consultation. Patients use the Ditto app to record their appointment, with the consent and awareness of their doctor. Ditto's AI processes the recording and produces a structured summary in plain language, organizing the key information — diagnosis, treatment plan, medication instructions, follow‑up requirements — into a format that a patient can read, share with family members, and reference later.

The clinical value of this is specific and documented. Patients who have access to an accurate summary of what their doctor said are better equipped to follow their care instructions, more likely to attend follow‑up appointments, and better able to communicate their health situation to family members and other care providers. For health insurers and healthcare systems, these downstream effects reduce the cost of re‑consultations and care non‑compliance.

Ditto co‑founders are CEO Tobias Lensing alongside Bart Voorn and Merlijn van Breugel. The team designed the product specifically for the patient side of the consultation, a choice that Lensing describes as a deliberate counter‑positioning to the prevailing direction of AI in healthcare: "Almost every AI company in healthcare today is building for doctors. All useful. But nobody is building for the person on the other side of the desk: the one who actually has to live with the diagnosis, remember the instructions, and explain it to their family that evening."

Traction That Made the Round Easy to Close

Ditto's commercial traction before this raise is the most compelling part of the story. The company launched in the Netherlands in August 2025 with the support of the Dutch Patients' Federation, which is one of the most significant institutional endorsements a patient‑facing health application can receive in the Dutch healthcare market. It set a target of 10,000 downloads in its first six months.

It hit that figure in under two weeks.

By the time the €7.6 million round closed, nearly 100,000 people had downloaded the app. Menzis, a major Dutch health insurer, became the first insurer to actively recommend Ditto to all its policyholders, a distribution endorsement that channels the product directly to the patients most likely to benefit from it. The app holds a 4.7‑star rating on both the App Store and Google Play, an exceptional quality signal for a health utility application where user experience tends to be secondary to clinical function.

In May 2026, Ditto won the Dutch National Healthcare Innovation Award, an initiative run by Zorginnovatie.nl and sponsored by ING. The award recognizes healthcare innovations that demonstrate measurable improvement in patient outcomes, care efficiency, or health system performance.

Heal Capital's investment thesis captures why the consumer adoption metrics are more important than the absolute size of the round: in digital health, consumer adoption is the hardest thing to achieve and the most durable competitive advantage once it exists. A health application with 100,000 users, 4.7‑star ratings, institutional insurer endorsement, and a national innovation award has demonstrated product‑market fit in a way that most health tech companies never achieve before their Series A.

The company is governed under the EU AI Act and publishes its compliance posture publicly. Rubio Impact Ventures' participation brings an explicit mandate to reach populations the healthcare system has historically underserved, a dimension of Ditto's potential impact that extends well beyond the Dutch market.

The €7.6 million funds the product team's expansion into appointment preparation, helping users get ready for upcoming consultations based on their consultation history rather than only summarizing past ones, alongside the Germany, UK, and Spain market entries planned for 2026.