For someone living with a chronic condition, the most useful information rarely comes from a clinic visit. It comes from another patient who has already tried the medication, weathered the side effect, fought the insurer, or found the specialist. mama health, a Berlin-based healthtech founded in 2022, is trying to turn that informal exchange into structured data that pharmaceutical commercial teams can actually use. The company runs AI-moderated patient interviews and applies process mining to the resulting narratives, producing journey maps of how people with long-term illness move through the healthcare system [Crunchbase] [mama health].
The patient population matters here. mama health has explicitly pointed to Long COVID as an early focus, a disease state where standard of care is still being defined and where lived patient experience is one of the few reliable signals available to drug developers and payers [5-HT]. Other chronic conditions sit in a similar gap: diagnosis can take years, treatment is often a sequence of trial and error across multiple specialists, and the emotional and logistical weight of the journey is largely invisible in claims data. Today, the standard of care for many of these patients is fragmented. A person with Long COVID, for instance, typically cycles through a primary care physician, a pulmonologist, a cardiologist, and sometimes a neurologist, with symptom management drawn from off-label use of existing drugs and rehabilitation programs. There is no single approved disease-modifying therapy, and clinical guidance from bodies including the NIH and EMA is still evolving. That fragmentation is precisely what mama health is trying to map.
The bet
The company sells to life sciences commercial teams: the groups inside pharma that need to understand how patients discover, choose, adhere to, and switch therapies. Rather than fielding traditional market research panels, mama health collects patient experiences through AI-moderated interviews, then applies process mining, a technique more familiar from enterprise software analytics, to reconstruct the patient journey at scale [Crunchbase] [mama health]. The output, according to the company, includes insight into healthcare system interactions, unmet needs, decision-making factors, and emotional drivers [mama health]. Co-founder Adriatik Nikaj has described the approach as discovering patient journeys from thousands of patient narratives, drawing on his work in process mining at the Hasso Plattner Institute's Business Process Technology group [HPI Business Process Technology].
The wedge is narrower and arguably more defensible than a general patient community play. Pharmaceutical commercial teams already buy real-world evidence and patient insight from large vendors, but the qualitative texture of how a patient actually experiences a disease is harder to source at scale. If mama health can convert open-ended patient conversation into structured journey models that a brand team or market access team can act on, it is selling something closer to a research instrument than a database.
Why it could be big
The tailwinds are real. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have been pushing patient-centered drug development for years. The FDA's Patient-Focused Drug Development guidance series and the EMA's parallel work on patient experience data have made it increasingly expected, and in some cases required, that sponsors document how patients experience their disease and treatment. That regulatory pressure flows downstream into commercial budgets, where the willingness to pay for rigorous patient insight has grown.
The investor base reflects a thesis rooted in German digital health and academic computer science. mama health's pre-seed round in June 2023 drew Brandenburg Kapital, Programma 101, HPI Seed, and HPI Ventures [Crunchbase, Jun 2023]. The HPI connection is not incidental: two of the three founders have ties to the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, and the institute's strength in process mining is the technical backbone of the product.
| Round | Date | Lead | Notable investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-Seed | Jun 2023 | Undisclosed | Brandenburg Kapital, Programma 101, HPI Seed, HPI Ventures |
The team and traction
mama health was co-founded by Mattia Marco Caruson, Jonas Witt, and Adriatik Nikaj [Tracxn]. Caruson, the CEO, was educated at Università Bocconi in Milan [LinkedIn] and has represented the company at industry venues including EPHMRA in Basel, the European pharmaceutical market research association's annual gathering [mama health]. Witt studied medicine and completed a master's in Digital Health at the Hasso Plattner Institute [Medizin Pioniere Podcast] [XPOMET]. Nikaj, also educated at HPI [LinkedIn], brings the process mining expertise that distinguishes the company's analytical layer [HPI Business Process Technology]. The combination of a clinician, a process mining researcher, and a commercially trained CEO is a coherent fit for selling research instruments into pharma.
The honest counterfactual
The bears will note that mama health is entering a category populated by well-capitalized incumbents and adjacent specialists: IQVIA and Komodo Health on the analytics side, PicnicHealth and PatientsLikeMe on the patient data side, and Ada Health and StuffThatWorks on patient-facing AI. Pharma commercial teams already have procurement relationships with several of these vendors, and displacing or even supplementing those contracts at a seed-stage company is a long sales cycle. The bull answer is that mama health is not trying to be a claims database or a symptom checker. Its bet is that AI-moderated qualitative interviews, structured by process mining, produce a category of insight the incumbents do not currently sell. If that is true, it is additive to existing budgets rather than competitive with them, which is a friendlier path into pharma procurement.
The other open question is data governance. Patient narratives are sensitive, and any platform operating in the EU must contend with GDPR, the EU AI Act's provisions on health-related systems, and the emerging European Health Data Space framework. The company has not publicly detailed its consent and data handling architecture in the captured sources, and prospective pharma buyers will scrutinize it closely. None of this is unusual for a seed-stage healthtech, but it is the work that has to be done before contracts get signed at scale.
What to watch
The next twelve months will likely turn on two questions: how many disease areas mama health can credibly cover beyond its early Long COVID focus, and whether it can convert pilot engagements with pharma commercial teams into recurring contracts. A seed extension or Series A would be the natural financing milestone, and the composition of that round, particularly whether a pharma-strategic investor joins, will say a lot about how the buyer side views the product. For now, the company is making a specific and humane bet: that the most underused asset in chronic disease commercialization is the patient's own account of what it is like to be sick, and that AI can finally make that account legible at scale.
Disease state: chronic conditions, with early emphasis on Long COVID. Patient population: adults living with long-term illness across Western Europe. Standard of care: fragmented, multi-specialist, and largely without disease-modifying therapy in the Long COVID case. I will be watching the Series A.
Pulse Raman