Bildnachweis: PwC Germany; Simplants.
PwC Germany’s ‘Scale Program Cloud in Healthcare’ connects investors, corporates, hospitals, and B2B healthtech start-ups to accelerate clinically validated innovation. Simplants, part of the programme, is developing a data-driven platform for medtech procurement and inventory management. Jannis Grube from PwC Germany and Andreas du Plessis, Simplants, discuss AI, interoperability, and collaboration as drivers of healthcare transformation.
VC Magazin: With the ‘PwC Scale Program Cloud in Healthcare,’ PwC is focusing on connecting investors, corporates and start-ups from the B2B healthtech sector. What was the rationale behind launching the programme, and what does it look like in detail?
Grube: B2B healthtech is reaching a turning point as several structural dynamics are unfolding at the same time: regulatory change at EU and national level – from the European Health Data Space to Medical Device Regulation –, sustained financial pressure across the healthcare system, and a broader renewal cycle of core clinical IT such as hospital information systems and electronic health records. Innovation in this environment rarely succeeds through isolated initiatives. It requires coordination across stakeholders who usually operate in very different realities. The programme brings investors, corporates, hospital groups, and selected B2B start-ups into a focused, outcome‑oriented setting. What connects them is a shared ambition: helping technologies that are already validated find their way into real commercial and clinical use within a highly regulated market.
VC Magazin: Why does the healthcare sector need a programme like this?
Grube: Many clinical IT landscapes that were considered robust ten years ago now limit interoperability, slow down AI adoption, and lock organisations into cost structures that are difficult to sustain. At the same time, healthcare does not allow for experimentation without guardrails. Patient safety, regulation, and reimbursement logic impose constraints that are very different from classical SaaS or consumer technology. This creates a tension that no single player can solve on their own. Start-ups are looking for access to clinical decision‑makers, compliant cloud environments, and investors who understand healthcare timelines. Hospitals and corporates want a de‑risked way of engaging with innovation without overwhelming procurement, IT security, or compliance teams. Investors are looking for deal flow that has been tested against clinical and regulatory reality. Therefore, structured formats that bring these perspectives together are one of the prerequisites for ensuring that innovation ultimately reaches patients.
VC Magazin: More than a year ago, you closed a seed financing round of EUR 2.2 million. With your data-driven platform, you aim to digitalise and streamline procurement, sales, and inventory processes between hospitals and medical technology manufacturers. What has been your experience working with hospitals so far, and how can your solution provide support?
du Plessis: Across hospitals, medical devices procurement is reactive, not predictive. Teams move, count, and reorder materials manually, while inventory is too low or too high. The result: workload, tied-up capital, expiry write-offs, and stockouts. The root cause is fragmented information: enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and hospital information systems (HIS) lack one shared view of stock, consumption, expiry, supplier availability and demand, and links to orders and deliveries. Simplants creates an analytical, predictive and transactional layer connecting hospitals and suppliers. It structures product, inventory, and transaction data through a medical-device taxonomy, turning it into forecasts, reorder and substitution recommendations, inter-site balancing, and orders within guardrails. Our work confirms hospitals’ readiness for adoption despite legacy-system integration complexity: they clearly recognize today’s inefficiencies and are open to solutions that free scarce resources.
VC Magazin: What motivated you to apply for the PwC programme, and what kind of added value are you hoping to gain from it?
du Plessis: We applied because technology is only one part of the challenge; adoption in healthcare requires trust, integration, regulatory understanding, and access to the right decision-makers. Having worked with PwC before on corporate projects, I value their structured, pragmatic approach and their ability to connect strategic perspective with relevant healthcare and corporate stakeholders. Through the programme, we hope to validate our platform, sharpen our go-to-market approach and accelerate partnerships – moving Simplants from a strong product and pilot foundation toward a scalable operating platform for medtech procurement, inventory and supplier coordination.
VC Magazin: AI, data platforms, and automation are regarded as major drivers of the future healthcare sector. Where do you currently see the most tangible benefits of AI and cloud technologies in day-to-day clinical practice, and what opportunities do they hold for the future?
du Plessis: Right now, we see the most tangible benefits of AI and cloud technologies in areas where they reduce workload, provide cost savings, and create immediate patient benefit: clinical documentation, decision support, diagnostics, robotic procedures, and operational workflow automation. AI transcription can give clinicians time back; AI-supported diagnostics can improve speed and consistency; robotics can increase precision and standardisation in procedures. But the real unlock is the data foundation underneath. Most healthcare systems today are still built around fragmented legacy systems and closed workflows. For AI to create full-cycle value, clinical, operational, and supply-chain data must become structured, interoperable, and accessible through secure, cloud-based platforms. We believe the future healthcare stack will be more modular and ecosystem-driven: specialised point solutions, open interfaces, and shared data layers that allow one solution to interact with another. A surgical robot, for example, should not operate in isolation: it should understand which materials, implants or instruments are available, compatible, documented, and replenished. That is where clinical automation, procurement, inventory, traceability, and supplier coordination begin to converge.
VC Magazin: How important will collaboration between hospitals, industry, and start-ups be for the next wave of innovation in healthcare?
du Plessis: Healthcare innovation cannot be built in isolation. The sector is too complex, too regulated, and too workflow-dependent for solutions designed from the outside. That’s why Simplants was created from the concrete needs of both a hospital group and a medical device manufacturer. That dual perspective is essential: only by designing for both sides can we build an end-to-end platform that improves clinical workflows, procurement, inventory and supplier coordination at the same time.
Grube: I agree – collaboration will be decisive. Each group brings something essential to the table, but also clear limitations. Hospitals provide clinical context, data, and patient relationships, yet operate under significant operational pressure. Industry contributes scale, regulatory expertise, and capital, but often innovates within established portfolio boundaries. Start-ups add speed and new architectures, but typically lack access and long‑term resilience. Progress accelerates when these actors co‑design solutions from the outset – including procurement, IT security, and workflow integration.
VC Magazin: Thank you for your insights.
About the interviewees:
Jannis Grube is Head of Startups at PwC Germany and is responsible for establishing and developing programmes that connect start-ups, corporations, and investors. In this role, he actively promotes collaboration within the innovation ecosystem and supports high-growth companies as they scale their operations.
Andreas du Plessis is co-founder and CEO of Simplants. Over 25 years, he helped shape vertical e-commerce, marketplace, and omnichannel models in retail and B2B; at Simplants, he applies these learnings to medtech – building a connected, data-driven platform linking procurement, sales, inventory, and supply chains end to end.
