What is Tucuvi?
Tucuvi is a Madrid-based healthtech company that provides a clinical voice AI platform designed to automate patient follow-ups and care management through empathetic, clinically validated phone conversations. Founded in 2019 by biomedical engineers María González Manso and Marcos Rubio Rubio, the company raised €17 million ($20 million) in Series A funding in January 2026, led by Cathay Innovation and Kfund, to expand operations across Europe and the United States.
The platform’s AI voice agent, named LOLA, conducts clinical-grade phone conversations with patients to monitor chronic conditions, support post-discharge recovery, and execute care coordination workflows. The company has become the first AI platform to receive European Class IIb Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) certification for both its voice agent and care management platform, establishing regulatory credibility that distinguishes it from competitors in the rapidly growing healthcare AI market.
With more than 60 healthcare organisations currently using the platform globally, including over 10% of public hospitals in Spain, the company reports clinical outcomes including a 54.69% reduction in heart failure readmissions and up to 80% automation in nursing follow-ups. Major partners include AstraZeneca, the UK National Health Service, and Vall d’Hebron Hospital, one of Spain’s leading medical centres.
The Personal Story: From Tragedy to Healthcare Innovation
The inspiration behind the company emerged from profound personal loss. María González Manso’s mother passed away following a reported hospital administration error, a tragedy that exposed the human cost of overwhelmed healthcare systems struggling with workforce shortages and operational complexity.
González Manso, trained as a biomedical engineer, recognised that technology could address these systemic challenges. Healthcare professionals want to provide excellent care but lack capacity to personally follow up with every patient. Administrative burdens consume hours that could be spent on direct patient care. Communication gaps lead to preventable complications, readmissions, and in the worst cases, deaths like that of González Manso’s mother.
Rather than accepting these limitations as inevitable, González Manso and her co-founder Marcos Rubio Rubio began developing AI technology that could handle high-volume routine patient interactions whilst maintaining clinical rigor and patient trust. The vision was to free healthcare professionals to focus on complex clinical judgments whilst AI managed the standardised protocols, workflows, and monitoring tasks that currently overwhelm nursing teams.
This mission-driven origin shapes the company’s culture and approach. The founders don’t view AI as replacing healthcare professionals but rather as augmenting their capacity, enabling them to practice at the top of their training rather than spending time on administrative tasks and routine follow-ups that machines can handle effectively.
Revolutionary Technology: LOLA the Clinical Voice AI
How LOLA Works
LOLA is a voice-based AI agent that conducts secure phone conversations with patients, executing clinical and care coordination workflows whilst escalating to human teams when necessary. Unlike chatbots that respond to typed messages or voice assistants focused on simple tasks, LOLA handles complex clinical conversations requiring empathy, medical knowledge, and real-time decision-making.
The system uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand patient responses, identify health concerns in real-time, and determine appropriate next steps based on clinical protocols. When patients describe symptoms suggesting deterioration or complications, LOLA automatically alerts medical teams to prioritise those requiring urgent intervention.
The conversational design focuses on creating patient-friendly interactions that feel natural rather than robotic. LOLA adapts communication style based on patient responses, showing patience when patients struggle to articulate symptoms, providing reassurance when patients express anxiety, and asking follow-up questions to clarify ambiguous responses.
Each conversation follows validated clinical protocols developed in collaboration with medical professionals. These protocols define what questions to ask, how to interpret responses, when to escalate to human clinicians, and what guidance to provide patients. The AI operates within these evidence-based frameworks, ensuring clinical safety whilst enabling autonomous operation.
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Platform Integration and Workflow Orchestration
The company’s platform extends beyond voice conversations to orchestrate entire care workflows from start to finish. When LOLA identifies a patient requiring intervention, the system automatically creates tasks for appropriate clinical team members, documents findings in electronic health records, schedules follow-up calls, and tracks outcomes.
Integration with existing healthcare system operations proves critical for adoption. The platform connects with electronic medical record systems, hospital information systems, and care coordination platforms, enabling seamless data flow without requiring clinicians to access separate systems or manually transfer information.
The Phone Visit with Scribe feature automatically generates accurate summaries and transcriptions of clinician-led calls, reducing administrative burden on healthcare professionals who currently spend substantial time documenting conversations. This automation enables clinicians to see more patients whilst maintaining thorough documentation required for continuity of care and regulatory compliance.
Clinical Protocols and Customisation
The platform currently supports more than 50 customizable clinical workflows spanning diverse clinical applications. Post-surgical follow-ups monitor patients recovering from procedures to identify complications early. Chronic disease management protocols keep patients with conditions like heart failure, COPD, and diabetes engaged in their care between appointments.
Medication management protocols ensure patients understand prescriptions, identify side effects, and maintain adherence. Screening campaigns reach large populations for preventive care activities like cancer screening or vaccination. Pre-anaesthesia evaluations collect medical history and assess surgical risk. Appointment scheduling and demand management optimise clinic capacity.
Healthcare organisations can customize protocols to match their specific clinical guidelines and patient populations. This flexibility enables the platform to serve diverse specialties from cardiology to oncology to primary care, each with distinct workflows and clinical requirements.
Impressive Clinical Outcomes and Real-World Impact
Heart Failure Readmissions Reduction
The company’s partnership with AstraZeneca focused on heart failure monitoring, one of the most costly conditions for healthcare systems. Heart failure patients frequently experience exacerbations requiring hospitalisation, with readmission rates exceeding 20% within 30 days of discharge in many health systems.
The AI voice agent calls heart failure patients regularly after discharge, asking about symptoms like shortness of breath, weight gain, swelling, and fatigue. When responses suggest worsening condition, the system alerts cardiology teams who can adjust medications or schedule clinic visits before hospitalisation becomes necessary.
The results proved dramatic: a 54.69% reduction in heart failure readmissions compared to standard care. This outcome benefits patients who avoid hospitalisations, healthcare systems that reduce costs, and society that gets better value from healthcare spending. The clinical validation from this partnership established credibility with cardiologists and hospital administrators considering AI adoption.
Nursing Capacity Expansion
Healthcare workforce shortages create severe constraints on care delivery. Many health systems lack sufficient nurses to conduct routine patient follow-ups, leading to gaps in care that allow preventable complications. The company’s platform addresses this bottleneck by automating up to 80% of routine nursing follow-up tasks.
In post-surgery follow-ups, the platform reportedly increases nursing capacity by 10x, enabling one nurse to effectively monitor ten times as many patients as manual phone calls would allow. This capacity expansion doesn’t compromise quality because the AI follows validated protocols consistently whilst escalating complex cases to human clinicians.
The capacity gains enable healthcare organisations to scale services that were previously constrained by workforce availability. Hospital-at-home programmes can serve more patients. Chronic disease management programmes can engage entire patient populations rather than just highest-risk subsets. Post-discharge follow-up can reach all patients rather than selective samples.
Patient Satisfaction and Engagement
Beyond clinical metrics, patient feedback indicates high satisfaction with LOLA interactions. Many patients appreciate the convenience of receiving calls at home rather than travelling to clinics for routine check-ins. The consistency and patience of AI conversations appeal to patients who sometimes feel rushed during busy clinic visits.
The platform enables continuous and personalised care at scale, transforming episodic interactions into ongoing relationships. Rather than seeing doctors only when problems arise, patients receive regular monitoring, education, and support. This proactive engagement improves health literacy, medication adherence, and early problem detection.
The Founding Team: Forbes 30 Under 30 Honorees
María González Manso: CEO and Co-Founder
María González Manso serves as CEO and co-founder, bringing biomedical engineering training from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and passion for using technology to solve healthcare challenges. Her personal experience with healthcare system failures provides deep empathy for patients and families whilst motivating her to build solutions that prevent tragedies like the one her family experienced.
In 2025, González Manso was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list in the Science and Healthcare category, recognition of her leadership building one of Europe’s most innovative healthtech companies. She emphasises the mission driving the company: “Healthcare is under enormous pressure, and partial solutions are no longer enough. To continue providing quality care at scale, healthcare systems need AI they can trust: secure, auditable, and designed for real clinical environments.”
Her leadership focuses on regulatory compliance, clinical validation, and building trust with healthcare professionals who rightly maintain high standards for technologies touching patient care. Rather than moving fast and breaking things, González Manso prioritises safety, evidence, and responsible AI development appropriate for healthcare’s high-stakes environment.
Marcos Rubio Rubio: CTO and Co-Founder
Marcos Rubio Rubio serves as CTO and co-founder, leading technology development for the platform. Also trained as a biomedical engineer, Rubio Rubio brings technical depth in AI, NLP, and software architecture essential for building clinically validated voice AI.
Rubio Rubio was also named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe 2025 list alongside González Manso, recognising his technical contributions to healthcare AI. He emphasises the importance of building proprietary datasets of medical voice conversations that enable training NLP algorithms for accuracy whilst ensuring outstanding clinical conversations between patients and LOLA.
His focus on conversation design, voice interface quality, and patient experience ensures the technology meets functional requirements whilst remaining accessible and pleasant for diverse patient populations including elderly patients with limited technology experience.
Tucuvi Funding: From Seed to Series A Growth
Early Development and Validation
The company was founded in 2019 with initial seed funding from impact investors including Ship2B and Bolsa Social Fund. These early backers recognised both the social impact potential and commercial opportunity of clinical voice AI, providing capital for initial technology development and pilot projects with healthcare organisations.
In October 2022, the company received €5.5 million in grant funding from the European Innovation Council, a prestigious recognition that validated the technology’s innovation and potential. This non-dilutive capital supported clinical validation studies and regulatory approval processes essential for commercialisation.
Tucuvi Funding Series A: €17 Million Growth Round
In January 2026, the company announced €17 million in Series A funding led by Cathay Innovation and Kfund through its early-growth fund Leadwind. Existing investors Frontline Ventures, Seaya Ventures, and Shilling participated in the oversubscribed round, demonstrating continued confidence from early backers.
Jacky Abitbol, Managing Partner at Cathay Innovation, explained the investment thesis: “What convinced us at Cathay Innovation is the company’s ability to combine clinical rigor, regulatory credibility, and real-world scalability in a single platform. Its approach allows healthcare organisations to deploy autonomous AI with confidence, freeing up significant capacity for care teams whilst maintaining the highest levels of safety and quality. We believe the company is blazing a new trail in how AI can be responsibly integrated into healthcare operations.”
The Tucuvi funding will accelerate expansion across Europe and the United States, scale operations to serve growing demand from healthcare organisations, invest in product development expanding clinical protocols and capabilities, build commercial teams supporting customer acquisition and success, and strengthen regulatory affairs ensuring compliance across jurisdictions.
The Series A round positioned the company amongst the leading European healthcare AI platforms, joining a selective group attracting substantial venture capital during 2025-2026. The approximately €53 million raised across recent European healthcare AI announcements reflects growing investor confidence in companies increasing care capacity and operational efficiency through automation.
First-of-Its-Kind Regulatory Approval
One of the company’s most significant achievements is regulatory certification as a Class IIb Software as a Medical Device under European medical device regulations. The company reportedly became the first AI platform to obtain this certification for both its voice agent and patient management platform.
Class IIb represents a medium-high risk category requiring substantial clinical evidence, quality management systems, and ongoing surveillance. Achieving this certification demonstrates that regulatory authorities reviewed clinical data, assessed risks and benefits, evaluated software architecture and safeguards, and concluded the platform meets safety and performance requirements for medical use.
This regulatory achievement creates competitive moats that are difficult for competitors to replicate quickly. The certification process requires years of development, clinical studies, documentation, and regulatory review. Companies lacking this certification cannot legally market their voice AI as medical devices in Europe, limiting commercial opportunities with healthcare organisations prioritising compliant solutions.
The certification also establishes credibility with healthcare professionals who are rightfully cautious about AI claims. Clinicians know that achieving medical device status requires meeting rigorous standards, providing confidence that the technology has been properly validated rather than representing marketing hype.
Strategic Partnerships and Customer Adoption
AstraZeneca Collaboration
The partnership with AstraZeneca, one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, provides validation and opportunities. The heart failure monitoring programme demonstrated clinical benefit whilst giving AstraZeneca data about patient experiences, medication adherence, and disease progression between clinic visits.
Pharmaceutical companies increasingly recognise that drugs alone don’t determine outcomes. Patient support, monitoring, and engagement significantly impact treatment success. Partnerships with technology companies like the firm enable pharmaceutical manufacturers to offer comprehensive solutions combining medications with digital support improving real-world effectiveness.
UK National Health Service Deployment
Adoption by the UK NHS represents a significant achievement given the health service’s scale, complexity, and rigorous evaluation processes. The NHS serves over 60 million people and faces severe workforce shortages creating urgent need for technologies expanding capacity.
Success in the NHS environment demonstrates the platform can integrate with large, complex health systems and deliver value at scale. NHS adoption also provides a reference customer that influences healthcare organisations globally, as many look to NHS experiences when evaluating new technologies.
Spanish Public Hospital Penetration
Implementation in over 10% of Spanish public hospitals demonstrates strong domestic market traction. Spain’s public health system, whilst underfunded compared to some European peers, maintains high clinical standards and serves as an important proving ground for healthtech innovation.
The Spanish deployments provide rich data about performance across diverse clinical contexts, patient populations, and organisational structures. This experience informs product development whilst building case studies supporting expansion to other markets.
Vall d’Hebron and Leading Academic Medical Centres
Partnerships with prestigious institutions like Vall d’Hebron Hospital, one of Spain’s premier academic medical centres, provide clinical credibility. Academic medical centres maintain high standards for evidence and innovation, making them influential reference customers despite representing a small portion of the overall market.
Frequently Asked Questions About Tucuvi
What is LOLA and how does it work?
LOLA is an AI-powered voice agent that conducts clinical-grade phone conversations with patients to monitor symptoms, provide medical information, and check treatment adherence. The system uses Natural Language Processing to understand patient responses, identify health concerns in real-time, and escalate high-risk cases to medical teams. LOLA follows validated clinical protocols ensuring safe, consistent care whilst maintaining empathetic, patient-friendly interactions.
Is the AI voice platform safe and regulated?
Yes, the company is the first AI platform to receive European Class IIb Software as a Medical Device certification for both its voice agent and care management platform. This regulatory approval required demonstrating safety, effectiveness, and quality management systems through clinical evidence and rigorous review. The platform is secure, auditable, and designed specifically for clinical environments rather than adapted from consumer applications.
What healthcare organisations use the platform?
More than 60 healthcare organisations globally currently use the platform, including over 10% of public hospitals in Spain, elements of the UK National Health Service, major institutions like Vall d’Hebron Hospital, and through partnership with AstraZeneca for heart failure monitoring. The company is expanding across Europe and the United States following its January 2026 Series A funding.
What clinical applications does the platform support?
The platform supports more than 50 customisable clinical workflows including post-surgical follow-ups, chronic disease management for conditions like heart failure and COPD, medication management, screening campaigns, pre-anaesthesia evaluations, test preparation instructions, appointment scheduling, and demand management. Healthcare organisations can adapt protocols to their specific guidelines and patient populations.
Who founded the company and why?
María González Manso and Marcos Rubio Rubio, both biomedical engineers, co-founded the company in 2019. González Manso’s mother died following a reported hospital administration error, motivating her to build technology preventing similar tragedies. Both founders were named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe 2025 list in Science and Healthcare, recognising their innovation in clinical AI.
How much funding has the company raised?
In January 2026, the company raised €17 million in Series A funding led by Cathay Innovation and Kfund. Previous funding included seed investment from Ship2B and Bolsa Social Fund, plus a €5.5 million grant from the European Innovation Council in 2022. The Series A positions the company for expansion across Europe and the United States.