Corti steps up its support for the next wave of healthcare startups as OpenAI pushes into the space and others retreat from Europe

As compliance pressure mounts in every major healthcare AI market, Corti launches its Startup Acceleration Program to help founders clear a €600,000 regulatory barrier and build on the vertical model that outscored OpenAI on its new healthcare benchmark

COPENHAGEN, Denmark, May 13, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Corti, the frontier lab for clinical-grade AI, today announced that Symphony, its flagship clinical-grade model, has outscored OpenAI on HealthBench Professional, the company's new healthcare benchmark.

To bridge the gap between benchmark performance and real-world deployment, Corti launched the Startup Acceleration Program, a no-equity initiative providing healthcare AI builders worldwide with access to the same clinical-grade models that power AI for highly regulated systems across Europe and the U.S. The grant-funded program aims to help founders ship and scale at a moment when the regulatory bar for healthcare AI has never been higher.

The launch comes at a structural inflection point for the sector. Healthcare AI builders now face tightening regulation in every major market - from the FDA's expanded AI/ML guidance in the U.S. to new lifecycle accountability requirements in Canada and the UK. But Europe is the most acute case. In the past four weeks, OpenAI rolled out free clinical AI to every verified American physician. One week later, OpenEvidence - a clinical AI platform used daily by 40% of US physicians and valued at $12 billion - withdrew from the UK and European markets, citing regulatory uncertainty around the EU AI Act. The high-risk system requirements that drove that decision will come into force for medical AI on August 2, 2026.

Europe has emerged as the toughest proving ground for clinical-grade AI - and the asymmetry is sharpening. EU MDR certification alone now costs founders between €200,000 and €600,000 per device and takes 12 to 18 months. Capital is concentrating in larger, later-stage rounds, with investors increasingly favouring companies with proven clinical evidence and workflow integration. The structural difficulty is real enough to deter horizontal players - and the vertical products built on them - from competing in Europe, implying a narrower path for the next wave of healthcare AI builders to succeed there at exactly the moment they are needed most. But the reality is that the conditions making Europe hard for horizontal players are the same conditions that Corti was built for:

"The future of healthcare AI won't be built by one company. It will be built by thousands of teams, each with deep knowledge of a specific care setting, workflow, or patient population," said Andreas Cleve, co-founder and CEO of Corti. "Our job is to give those builders a head start: the leading clinical AI model, the evidence base behind it, and a path to production we've already navigated for regulated health systems. So they can focus on what only they can do - the workflow, the patient population, the problem they actually understand."

Among the hundreds of development teams already building on Corti is Aisel Health, a European startup building AI for psychiatry:

"Psychiatrists are a scarce and highly specialized resource. They should be focused on one thing only: making clinical decisions - everything else needs to go. Yet today, the majority of a psychiatrist's time is spent not on clinical decision-making, but on the administrative and repetitive workflows surrounding it. By using Corti, we at Aisel can focus on delivering specialized psychiatric workflows that help clinicians regain capacity, rather than rebuilding the clinical-grade foundation underneath," said Augusta Klingsten Peytz, co-founder and CEO of Aisel Health.

The Startup Acceleration Program includes:

• Up to $5,000 in credits across the full Symphony stack - Agents, Medical Coding, Speech-to-Text, and Text Generation - built on over 1.5 million hours of clinical audio
• Support from Corti's clinical and regulatory team to navigate EU AI Act, MDR, and data residency requirements
• Dedicated time with Corti's AI experts to scope product roadmaps and architect the right system before code is written
• Founder-led webinars on industry developments and Corti's own roadmap
• Invitations to Corti events in New York, Copenhagen, London, and Berlin

Applications open today, reviewed on a rolling basis with a one-week turnaround. No pitching, no committee, no equity. Open to worldwide pre-seed through Series B companies building in healthcare, clinical workflows, or adjacent life sciences.

To apply, visit http://www.corti.ai/corti-for-startups.

About Corti

Corti is healthcare's frontier lab for clinical-grade AI. Symphony, its flagship clinical-grade AI model, powers clinical and administrative applications for EHR vendors, virtual care platforms, practice management systems, and life sciences organizations worldwide. Corti serves over 100 million patients annually across health systems including the NHS. The company is headquartered in Copenhagen with offices in New York and London. For more information, visit corti.ai.

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