Start-up from Porto Sword Health gets funding of 85 million dollars and wants to double its workforce

Sword Health, the tech company from Porto got a 85 million dollars funding (71.4 million euros), and wants to hire immediately. Last February, the company opened vacancies as a result of the increase in demand for digital physiotherapy to replace in-person sessions, owing to the new confinement; now, SWORD Health wants to double its workforce and hire up to 200 collaborators to work in its office in Porto, for starters.

The company was founded in Porto in 2015, and it is growing fast in the American market – it represents 190 million dollars – owing to the digital physiotherapy it has developed by combining clinical and artificial intelligence teams. The tech company has been developing this solution since 2015, and already invested nearly 21 million euros in this platform.

Amid the ongoing pandemic, the exponential rise in demand for digital physiotherapy across the Atlantic, throughout 2020 and in 2021, required that teams were strengthened with more collaborators, owing to the series B Funding of 25 million dollars; as such, the office in Porto hired collaborators in the fields of technology, product and operations. With this new investment attraction, a series C Funding of 85 million dollars (the second largest ever for a Portuguese company), the company will double its workforce to operate in the offices set up in Sá da Bandeira, in Downtown Porto, in Salt Lake City and in New York, and the number of new collaborators can add up to as much as 400 new workers, according to Dinheiro Vivo.

The investment in the Portuguese start-up was led by the American venture-capital company General Catalyst, who has already funded tech companies such as Airbnb, Snapchat and Stripe. The group also includes BOND, Highmark Ventures and BPEA, and the current investors Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, Transformation Capital and Green Innovations.

In a news release, Delian Asparuhov, of the Founders Fund, affirms that “Sword is positioned to play one of the most important roles in the business sector in the next five years”. In turn, Chris Bischoff, Director of General Catalyst was “enthusiastic” by the partnership that was able “to impact 2 billion patients all over the world, by helping to resolve one of the most important and urgent issues of health care in the world”, as is the case of musculoskeletal pathologies.

Besides the strengthening of the workforce, SWORD Health is also setting its sights on new digital therapies and the acceleration of the expansion process, whose operation already reaches Europe, the United States and Australia. By combining AI and clinical teams, the company states that this investment will enable to access a “600% growth per year” and “an increase of more than 1000% in the number of patients under treatment, which position SWORD Health as “one of the fastest growing start-ups in the United States”.