Fabio Schmidberger: Co-Founder and CEO at voize announcing their $50m Series A led by Balderton!

0:01Fabio Schmidberger:Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show. I'm Seb Johnson. I'm here with Fabio, the CEO and co-founder of Voice, who have just announced a whopping $50 million Series A. Amazing news. Congratulations. How are you feeling today, Fabio? Thank you very much, Sebastian. Really appreciate this. Yeah, it's a super exciting time and we are really eager to continue building the company. Amazing. Well, look, can you just give like a super quick kind of intro into what you've built? Yeah, so we, we started the company back when my grandpa moved into a long-term care facility and the nurses in his facility, they would continue to write his medical documentation with a pen on the back of their hand.

0:44And then at the end of the shift, all of the blood pressure, the medication, the positioning, everything is like typed into the computer. And this is super cumbersome, like very error prone and also quite time consuming. And this was the origin of voice. So we've built an AI assistant for nurses that automates the entire documentation workflow. Nurses simply just speak into the phone. We know what's going on. We have all the context. And then we generate the correct structured documentation records in the electronic health record system of the skilled nursing, assisted living or disabled care facility.

1:26Fabio Schmidberger:Amazing. And I read that it's been used by 75 ,000 nurses already, which is a phenomenal number. How are you able to sort of break into this industry? Yeah, I think when you look at it and you start talking to first nurses, but also operators of these skilled nursing facilities, the number one problem everybody has is you have a massive labor shortage, while at the same time, the administrative workload just continues to grow. And today about 30 % of the time of a nurse is actually not spent with patients or with residents, but it's spent with administrative tasks. And just like looking at Europe and the US, like that's 5.5 billion hours every year or$250 billion in labor costs, like every year spent on something that I would say is arguably in many cases far too complex and far too time consuming.

2:27And actually like nurses, they joined the profession because they want to spend time with the patients and with the residents. So this is a problem that everybody's aware of. It resonates really well with the nurses. And we're actually able to create time for the stuff that really matters. And that's taking care of residents and patients.

2:47Fabio Schmidberger:Amazing. And what's the feedback and the reaction been from those nurses who have been using your product? Yeah, I think there's a lot of nurses who get it right away and absolutely fall in love. And that's great feedback as well. But the part that is most memorable for me are the reactions of nurses who are initially reluctant and then they could go through the training with us. So we had a couple of weeks ago, we had this really charming nurse. She was called Manuela. She was two years before her retirement and understandably, she was a little bit reluctant to learn a new tool, learn a new technology.

3:30she and she said look hey i don't really want to take part in this like onboarding session i'd rather just like stay on the floor take care of my residents uh so we convinced her and the other nurses they convinced her to say hey let's take these like 35 minute training calls here and if you don't like it after the training calls like don't worry you don't have to use it afterwards was right um and then like doing this training program like she she realized oh like it's just like whatsapp was her framing right like she said it's just like whatsapp i press one button and i say what i did to with my residents and then all of the documentation is automated and i think this is a really interesting anecdote because it shows that with this ai technology that we're able to bring into these skilled nursing homes, not just the people who are traditionally.

4:30Very open to technology, very eager to try out new things. Like even the people who are struggling with technology, who are a little bit afraid of sometimes using the PC and the facility, they realize like with AI, you can make everything so much easier. So, and instead of remembering and knowing how to use like 55 different menus and filling out like long complex assessment and forms on the computer, there's just one button and voice and the rest is then automated. So it makes it much more accessible for these people who, who just don't want to bother and deal with the complex systems. and at the end the nice thing with manuela was like she uh she she didn't want to give the phone back to the to to the training team because we had another training session coming afterwards and we needed the phones to for everybody to have devices for the next group and she refused to give the phone back she took the phone and went on the nursing floor and actually did her entire shift documentation right after the training.

5:42And I think this is really nice to see that it's so well adopted in these facilities.

5:48Fabio Schmidberger:Yeah, I mean, it's an amazing bit of like product feedback or user experience, right? The people immediately, the nurse, Manuela immediately wants to take it and use it and can see the value. How do you balance, I guess, you know, both building a technical product and trying to make that as powerful as possible, but also doing, I guess, like a lot of these training and onboarding sessions and trying to, because I guess you're building a complex a product that's probably complex to build for not very tech native consumer set how do you kind of marry those two together yeah yeah that's a really important aspect of the of the concept because i think in many cases like we as the technology companies or engineers, we completely underestimate the second half of the journey, right?

6:38Like the first part and your right to existence is building a great product. But then the second part, and this is something that is really key to voice, is making sure that you have the great processes, the right team members, and also the enablement for the customers to actually adopt this technology. and the core aspect for us like we have a dedicated onboarding team and a really strong customer success team and from day one like we've put a lot of emphasis on actually making sure that tech can be used and adopted in these facilities and during the earliest days like my co-founder Marcel and I like we spent a lot of time a predominant amount of our time in facilities like training, onboarding, enabling nurses.

7:31And then our third co-founder and CTO, Eric, he was handling the technical side and taking all of this feedback and input from nurses to actually ensure that the product is as easy as possible to use. But we think it's really key to have in-person onboarding sessions, really make sure that the nurses are able to adopt the system And in many cases, it's also a combination of taking away a little bit of the fear and concerns with there's new stuff coming. So you need to make it really tangible and easy for them to use. And then we've built a train-the-trainer concept that allows some of the nurses on the floor to actually take over, to some extent, the responsibility and the ownership of enabling their colleagues.

8:31And this is a really powerful mechanism because then you have essentially like 24-7 access in your team to someone who's a real champion and knows best how to use the system. And they have the perfect context to explain it to everybody else in the team.

8:50Fabio Schmidberger:And it seems to be going really well. I mean, I read that it's also being like having voice is now being advertised in jobs for nurses so that it's like, hey, come work with us because we have this amazing tool. Which I think is like an amazing sign that things are going well, that people are wanting to move. They don't want to give up that technology, right? Those consumers have become very sticky in their use of it. Yeah. I also want to talk about that the round itself is huge. $50 million Series A for a European company is pretty, pretty massive. Yeah. Where did that come from? Kind of what gave Bulletin Capital, who's led around the conviction to kind of invest this much at this stage?

9:31Yeah. I think that two core components, like when you look at the overall market, I think there's a real demand and need for a technology that is making nursing easier, are less and the admin work less time consuming because we have such a massive labor shortage while at the same time the number of people in both europe and in the u.s who are in demand of care is growing so rapidly so there's just like a supply and demand problem here in the overall market and we need to have some technology that makes it so that the the people like the nurses the team members, they are able to focus on what's really mattering.

10:21And that's working with the residents. And the second component is like voice as a product, it fits absolutely perfect for these demands. We see that the overall usage and adoption is growing absolutely rapidly. And today, for example, we have generated about a hundred million documentation records. Like the product and company were, um, we're growing like over 3.4 X year over year, and we have about 96 % 12 month user retention, which is crazy good. So you have, when the product is used by nurse, they absolutely fall in love with it. It's really sticky and the adoption is great. And I think the combination of the team being super dedicated, purpose-driven, exceptional individuals here at a company in every department from engineering to customer success to go to market, as well as the product just fitting so well with the problem.

11:28That's the perfect combination that we've seen.

11:31Fabio Schmidberger:Yeah, absolutely. And when you say that like that, it's super clear, right? Huge market opportunity for this. the technology is perfectly it is ripe right now to kind of solve this problem and you've built a world-class team to kind of to build the product to solve the problem and those retention stats are phenomenal wow like that's like for consumer retention that's absolutely top top top performing um yeah that's amazing and so yeah i guess that that'll make sense and what are you going to use that money for i know you've been predominantly in in europe i think you've done a bit of stuff in america already is that part of the plan to kind of to go to go further and deeper into america yeah yeah so i think the the core concept uh the philosophy behind the round is like there are so many different professions like um software engineers like lawyers like um physicians who get dedicated ai models built for them and we have the core belief that like nursing long-term care and the care profession needs and deserves a fully dedicated from the ground up engineered AI model and AI capability fitting their specific needs, like offline capability, abbreviations, dialects, all of these nursing-specific workflows need to be from the ground up built into these AI models.

12:58So that's why we said, okay, let's, um, be sure like that voice is going to be the player that builds AI for nursing. And this is why we've taken on a rather large series, Hey, in order to really be able and have the capability of from the ground up engineering these models ourselves, and we've done so over the last years by building our own machine learning team, exceptionally successfully. And the second component is we not just want to go deeper and enable more use cases and workflows for nurses with our product. We also want to make this available and accessible to more and more nurses in different areas.

13:42And one part of this, as you mentioned, Sebastian, is the geographic expansion. So expanding into the US where we're running first pilots with customers, but also making us able for nurses in other professions to use the system. For example, in hospitals, meaning acute care nurses. Here we're running pilots, for example, with Agaplasia and one of the largest hospital providers in Europe or in disabled care and in-home care, for example. So we really want to double down and making sure we're building the best product for nurses and we're making it available for everyone.

14:26Fabio Schmidberger:Amazing. Yeah. It makes total sense. I can really see that the market size is big enough that focusing on nurses is going to be a huge, huge opportunity. I also want to ask a bit about because I think you founded this company with your brother. I always find family dynamics and startups super interesting. how have you found the process of like building alongside him yeah so um we founded the company as a like a three three co-founders so marcel my identical twin brother and eric he's a colleague we've met over 10 years ago now in school and we've worked together in the in the entirety time and the really important aspect is that this like long-term relationship that you have with your co-founders that gives you so much trust.

15:16And when the company is growing so rapidly, like that's absolutely key that you have the total trust and total conviction in your co-founders and you know, anything that they're touching is going to be remarkable, resulting in remarkable results. And in many cases, like when you look at the historic data, like typically startups they don't die from what I would call homicide they die from suicide so if there is misalignment in the team if there's infighting if there are disagreements or if you and your co-founder for example are not able to work really productively and efficiently together and by founding a company together with people who you respect and know and work together for years and years before you started the company is such a great recipe for success.

16:13Fabio Schmidberger:Yeah, and it's hard to, I guess, once you've got that relationship with someone so close to you, you know, so I guess it's an amazing foundation to build upon. Looking forward, right, you've raised this big Series A, you know, you're going after a huge market opportunity, both across Europe and the US. What do you want to achieve? What is it that you want to get maybe out of 2026 or maybe before you get to your series b what are kind of the milestones or the high level achievements that you want to get done to kind of take you to that next level yeah yeah so like the overall the mission of voice is to remove administrative workload automate administrative workload so that real time for patient care for resident care is available to nurses and as part of this, like we are now like doubling down in our, what we call like the voice 2.0 product version.

17:05Like we have a lot of in-depth capabilities that we're building right now to go even beyond documentation where we're right now building a lot of agentic workflows to take over some of the other administrative workflows that happen in nursing facilities. And then the second component is of course, like the, um, launch and market entry in adjacent markets. So the hospital sector, the in-home care sector and the disabled care sector. And we're taking all of this over into other countries like our market entry in the U S right now. And I think this is a really great combination because we are able to invest invest and double down so intensely on R and D while at the same time making the overall technology and the overall workflow accessible to so many new nurses.

18:03And just like fresh out of the press, we also finished our study together that we've completed the charity that had a look at what's actually happening when a facility uses voice. And we see that over 27 % of actual time savings in the documentation can be achieved. And for these facilities, such a remarkable impact that we want to bring this to as many nurses as we can.

18:31Fabio Schmidberger:Amazing. You seem to be absolutely crushing it. And the results speak for themselves. Now, I'd kind of like to finish up, you know, what has been the best point on this journey? you know what has been the one moment where you thought okay this is it like we've got something here this is going to work this is an amazing thing and then afterwards i want to hear you know what has been the lowest point maybe it's the biggest mistake that you've made or a moment where you thought oh god maybe we're like we're on the wrong track we we're not doing what we need to do yeah yeah i think for the for the like the best points there there are so many moments every time when you are in a nursing facility.

19:15So I really like to visit our customers, see how they are using the product, see how they are working with it and get firsthand feedback from nurses. And these are always the moments where you get a lot of energy from, where you see how the system is actually changing and transforming their work day. and where you hear anecdotes from nurses who are actually finally able to end their shift on time rather than doing overtime so they can pick up their children from school on time because now they need to spend so much less time with documentation and that's something that I find is really really amazing and where I'm particularly proud of that everybody here in the team is so driven and motivated by this.

20:10Of course, it's an intersection between, like we're developing a really high-end custom AI models here internally, but also like everybody that thinks about how do nurses interact with this? How does the workflow of a nurse look like? How can we make it easier for them to learn it? How can we make it easier for them to adopt the system? How can we enable and build new workflows around it so they get even more value out of it? And I think this is something that's absolutely core to our philosophy that we're super, super user-centric. And this is also like tying into your second question. What was the lowest point?

20:54I think early in the beginning when we started the company, we went in a little bit, I would say, naive. because we tried to use predominantly like existing AI models, like off-the-shelf models from Google and OpenAI. And we had so poor user adoption and the nurses, like they didn't like to use the system because it wouldn't understand their accent properly. It wouldn't understand their dialect properly. the domain specific terminology, one be properly, um, um, written down. And then also the key, the, the structure and the analytics of these, these information that would need at the end, be, um, be structured into complex assessments and individual forms.

21:49Like all of that was really, really hard. And it, like the, for the first customers, the nurses, they didn't want to use the phone. And so I shadowed them the entire day. I had the voice phone with the app in my hand. And every time when a nurse needs needed to document something, like we had the system set up so that she would tell me what I should be documenting. And I would try my best to make it work with the existing AI models. And this was something where, where honestly, like I was like really struggling and i had no clue how we could get this to work properly and how we can get nurses to actually adopt the system and then for us the solution was to really double down and from the ground up start engineering our own models where we have control and the deep ability to change and adapt everything so it actually works for the nurses amazing yeah i mean yeah it sounds like

22:53Fabio Schmidberger:you've been really at the front line of user experience, product development to kind of get you to where you are, which I think is, it's always an amazing trait when you meet a founder like that, who really does build in the trenches with their users. Um, well, Fabio, thank you so much for joining me again. Absolutely. Congratulations on the series. It's an amazing achievement. And I look forward to kind of seeing the rest of your journey. Fabio Sebastian. It was awesome to have you here. Cool. Let's stay in touch. Fabio Sebastian - Thank you.