The hospital operations startup has closed a Seed round backed by US-listed medtech company Novanta — securing both capital and a technology partnership that opens the door to the American market within the next twelve months.
The round
Health Lean Analytics (HLA) has closed an oversubscribed €1.4 million Seed round, bringing total capital raised to more than €2.1 million. The round includes private investment from family offices Inderhabs, Namarel, and Braincats, as well as a participative loan from ENISA — the Spanish National Innovation Company, a public body under the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism.
The headline addition is Novanta, a Nasdaq-listed medical technology company, which joins as a strategic and technology partner. Novanta will take a seat on HLA’s Board of Directors. The partnership is notable not just for the capital it represents, but for what it unlocks: Novanta’s RFID and sensing hardware is a natural complement to HLA’s analytics platform, and the company brings established distribution and market access in the United States — HLA’s primary target for international expansion.
“The incorporation of Novanta as an advanced technology partner validates our technological and strategic strength and provides us with the resources and expertise needed to accelerate our R&D innovation.”
Mauro Batesteza, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Health Lean Analytics
What HLA actually does
Founded in Barcelona in 2023, HLA has built an AI-powered platform focused on one of the most operationally complex environments in a hospital: the surgical suite. The operating room is expensive, tightly scheduled, and generates enormous amounts of data — most of which goes uncaptured or unanalysed in real time.
HLA’s platform passively collects clinical and operational data without requiring staff input, integrating with existing hospital systems to unify information on patients, surgical materials, medication, operating room utilisation, and equipment. It then applies AI and large language models to go beyond dashboards — interpreting patterns, flagging deviations before they become problems, and surfacing role-specific recommendations for clinicians and managers alike.
“Together, we’re closing the loop between physical hospital workflows and intelligent decision-making — a combination with the potential to fundamentally change how hospitals operate, starting with one of their most critical environments: the operating room.”
John Lesica, Co-COO, Novanta
The Novanta angle
The Novanta partnership is worth unpacking. The company’s RFID and sensing technologies are the hardware layer that generates much of the data HLA’s platform consumes — making this less a straightforward investor relationship and more a vertical integration of complementary capabilities. For HLA, it means its AI engine has a reliable, high-quality data supply chain. For Novanta, it extends the value of its sensor hardware into a software layer it did not have to build itself.
What’s next
HLA plans to use the capital to consolidate its position in Spain, deepen its R&D, and launch commercially in the United States within the next twelve months. The US market is both the most lucrative and the most demanding for medical software — regulatory hurdles are significant and procurement cycles long. Novanta’s existing footprint there will be central to how quickly HLA can move.
STARTUP MAFIA TAKE
HLA is a young company — founded in 2023, this is still early-stage — but the Novanta partnership is a meaningful signal. Strategic investors with hardware complementary to your software don’t typically come in at Seed unless they see a genuine integration story. The surgical suite focus is smart: it’s the highest-cost, highest-stakes part of a hospital, which means ROI on efficiency gains is easiest to quantify and hardest to argue with. The US expansion ambition is the obvious risk — twelve months is an aggressive timeline for a two-year-old Spanish startup to achieve commercial traction in American healthcare. But with Novanta opening doors, it’s at least a credible bet.
