HealthTechLeadershipEuropeUSAIDigital Health
HealthTech in 2026: What's Really Happening Across Europe and the US
Three years after the correction, HealthTech is entering a genuinely different phase — more selective, more clinical, and more consequential. Leonie Fehr on what's driving hiring on both sides of the Atlantic in 2026.
Three years after the peak-to-trough correction that reshaped digital health funding, HealthTech is entering a genuinely different phase. Not a recovery in the 2021 sense — valuations chasing TAM narratives on PowerPoint — but something more selective, more clinical, and in many ways more consequential. I spend most of my working days in this sector across Europe and increasingly in the US, and the conversations I'm having with boards, founders, and investors in the first half of 2026 are markedly different from what I was hearing even eighteen months ago.
The short version: companies that have real clinical outcomes data are raising and growing. Companies that don't are struggling to close Series B regardless of ARR. And the leadership required to navigate that environment is genuinely different from what built the first generation of HealthTech winners.
Europe: From Funding Frenzy to Clinical Proof
European HealthTech raised approximately €6.2 billion in 2025, down sharply from the €10+ billion years of 2021–2022 but stabilising into a more durable base. What's changed is not just the volume — it's the nature of the capital. The growth funds that were writing large cheques into pre-revenue digital health platforms in 2021 have largely stepped back. The money that's moving now is coming from healthcare-specialist investors, strategic corporate VCs (Bayer, Roche, AXA Venture Partners), and a small number of crossover funds that have built genuine clinical diligence capability.
The practical consequence is that the evidence bar for a European HealthTech Series B in 2026 looks more like a Series C did in 2019. Real-world outcomes data, published or at minimum peer-reviewed, is now table stakes for the growth round conversation. I've watched two strong teams with excellent ARR trajectories fail to close their B in the past twelve months because they could not produce clinical validation that satisfied the lead investor's medical advisory board. That would have been a rounding error in 2021. Today it is a blocking condition.
- Leonie Fehr, Key Search
Geographically, the European market is concentrating. The UK remains the dominant HealthTech hub — Babylon's collapse notwithstanding, London still attracts the deepest pool of clinical AI talent and has regulatory frameworks that reward innovation more than the MDR-first markets of central Europe. Germany's DiGA reimbursement pathway (digital health applications reimbursed directly by statutory insurance) is maturing, with 56 approved DiGAs as of early 2026 and a clearer commercial pathway than most European markets can offer. The Nordics are punching above their weight in mental health tech, chronic disease management, and remote monitoring — driven partly by integrated public health systems that create unique real-world data assets unavailable elsewhere.
The US: AI Is No Longer Optional
The US HealthTech picture is structurally different, and the difference matters for how you think about leadership. The US healthcare system's defining feature — its complexity — has become AI's most powerful commercial argument. When a hospital system is spending $800K per physician per year in administrative overhead, the ROI case for AI-assisted prior authorisation, clinical documentation, and care coordination does not require a leap of faith. It requires a proof of concept and a procurement relationship.
Ambient AI documentation is the clearest example. Nuance DAX, Suki, Abridge, and a dozen competitors are now embedded in clinical workflows at scale. Epic's AI integrations — covering everything from predictive readmission models to AI-drafted patient messages — are live in hundreds of health systems. Microsoft's Dragon Copilot is being piloted in large IDNs. This is not experimental. It is deployment at scale, and the commercial question is no longer whether it works but whether the implementation partner and the go-to-market team can actually capture the value.
- Leonie Fehr, Key Search
The GLP-1 wave deserves its own paragraph. Ozempic and Wegovy have done something that no HealthTech platform has managed in a decade: they've put metabolic health, chronic disease management, and preventive care on the boardroom agenda of every major health insurer in the US. The downstream opportunity — coaching platforms, nutrition tech, continuous glucose monitoring, cardiac risk stratification — is being capitalised at speed. Companies like Noom, Calibrate, and Ro are repositioning their entire commercial model around GLP-1 companion care. The leadership required to execute that pivot — clinical programme development, regulatory affairs, payor contracting, and consumer experience — is genuinely scarce.
Where the Markets Diverge — and Why It Matters
The most important structural difference between European and US HealthTech right now is not funding or market size — it's the regulatory posture. The EU Medical Device Regulation (MDR) and the emerging AI Act create a compliance overhead that is genuinely expensive for early-stage companies. The FDA's Digital Health Centre of Excellence, by contrast, has been moving faster — De Novo pathways for SaMD have shortened, and the 510(k) route for AI/ML-based diagnostics has become a credible commercial timeline rather than a multi-year risk.
This divergence has a direct consequence for talent. European HealthTech companies that want to enter the US market — and the ones worth backing almost always do — need regulatory affairs leadership that can navigate both regimes simultaneously. That person does not come from a single-market background. They come from multinationals (Philips, Siemens Healthineers, Roche Diagnostics) or from specialist regulatory consultancies with transatlantic practice. They are difficult to find, expensive to hire, and essential to get right.
The Mental Health Tech Reckoning
Mental health tech is the subvertical that concerns me most from a leadership perspective. The 2021–2022 funding wave produced a generation of teletherapy and digital mental health platforms that scaled acquisition before they scaled outcomes. The correction has been brutal — BetterHelp's parent Teladoc wrote down $13.4 billion across two years, and dozens of smaller platforms have shut down or been acqui-hired at distressed valuations.
What's emerging from the wreckage is more interesting. A smaller group of companies — Koa Health, Limbic, Wysa, and a handful of others — have built genuine clinical validation alongside their commercial models. The AI therapy companion space is being reset by the difference between symptom management tools with RCT backing and chatbots that feel therapeutic without being so. The regulatory environment is tightening on both sides of the Atlantic: the FDA is increasingly scrutinising mental health app claims, and NHS Digital's evidence standards for IAPT-pathway integration are becoming more rigorous.
- Leonie Fehr, Key Search
The Leadership Profiles That Actually Matter Right Now
Across the HealthTech mandates I'm working on in 2026, a clear pattern has emerged in the profiles that boards and investors actually need — as opposed to the ones they think they need when they draft the brief.
Chief Medical Officer briefs have fundamentally changed. The CMO role in HealthTech used to be primarily about credibility — a clinician's name on the website to reassure regulators and enterprise buyers. The CMO briefs I'm seeing now require someone who can lead clinical evidence programmes, engage directly with health system procurement, and serve as a genuine counterpart to the CTO in product development decisions. That is a rarer and more commercially capable profile than most boards expect to need.
Chief Revenue Officer demand in HealthTech is at its highest since 2019, but the brief has narrowed. Boards want CROs who have sold into both payors and providers — who understand the difference between a health system's IT procurement cycle and a commercial health plan's vendor evaluation process. Pure SaaS enterprise sales backgrounds are consistently disappointing in this context. The commercial architecture of healthcare is too specific.
VP of Regulatory Affairs with dual EU/US capability — as noted above — is the hardest hire in the sector. We typically see three to four qualified candidates globally for a well-specified brief at this level. If you are planning a US market entry and you have not started this search, you are already late.
Chief Data Officer profiles in HealthTech have a specific requirement that distinguishes them from CDOs in other sectors: they need to understand federated learning, synthetic data generation, and privacy-preserving AI architectures at a technical level. GDPR and HIPAA compliance are not enough. The real constraint on HealthTech AI is always data quality and data access, and the CDO who can build a real-world data asset — through health system partnerships, patient consent programmes, and regulatory-grade data governance — is the most strategically valuable hire in the sector right now.
What This Means for Your Next Hire
If you are a HealthTech founder or board preparing a senior hire in the second half of 2026, three things are worth sitting with before you write the brief.
First: the clinical validation requirement has permanently changed the profile of every commercially-facing hire you will make. Your CRO, your CMO, your VP of Partnerships — all of them now need to be fluent in the language of evidence. That is not a background check item. It is a core competency that needs to surface in the brief and in the interview process.
Second: the European and US markets are increasingly distinct in their talent pools, regulatory requirements, and commercial architectures. A leader who is genuinely effective across both is exceptional and will be priced accordingly. Be honest with yourself about whether you need truly transatlantic leadership or whether you need the best person in each market operating with strong coordination.
Third: the AI transformation of healthcare is not a future event you are preparing for — it is a present reality you are already operating in. The boards and leadership teams that treat it as a roadmap initiative rather than an operational condition are already behind the companies that do not. The executives who can close that gap are findable, but the search requires a process built for HealthTech specifically, not a generalist process adapted to it.
If you are working through a senior leadership decision in HealthTech and want a current view of the market, I'm happy to have that conversation.
Key Search
Key Search specializes in expansion hires across Europe, the US, and transatlantic searches. To find out more about our US and North American hiring capability, visit us below.
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