Every patient discharge in a European hospital triggers a paperwork cascade. Clinical information from the stay must be converted into standardised codes, the ICD classifications and procedure codes that determine what a hospital gets paid.
Someone has to navigate the legacy software, pull the right records, select the right codes, and enter them correctly. In many hospitals, that someone is a trained medical information specialist spending most of their working day on exactly this. It is painstaking, consequential, and almost entirely manual.
Parallel, a Paris-based startup founded in 2024, is building AI agents to do it instead. On Thursday the company announced a $20 million Series A led by Index Ventures, less than a year after its $3.5 million seed round closed in April 2025.
The funding will accelerate deployment of its existing coding agents, support international expansion, and fund development of new agents for billing, admissions, and other hospital administrative workflows.
The company’s technical approach is the pitch. Rather than integrating deeply with hospital software, a process that can take 12 to 24 months and often fails, Parallel’s agents operate on top of existing systems, learning to navigate them the way a human user would: reading screens, clicking through interfaces, and entering data.
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The company says this means a hospital can have the software running in as little as a week. Both the speed-of-deployment and integration-duration claims come from Parallel’s own materials and have not been independently verified, but the underlying approach, using computer-use agents that operate at the UI layer rather than requiring API access, is a recognised technique being applied across enterprise software contexts.
Parallel’s focus on the European market, where healthcare systems tend to be public and run on older infrastructure with fewer integration points, gives it a distinct positioning.
Its initial focus on medical coding, a billing process that is particularly complex in French public hospitals due to the PMSI (Programme de Médicalisation des Systèmes d’Information) coding framework, reflects a deliberate choice to start in a high-value, difficult-to-automate workflow rather than go broad from the outset.
Paul Lafforgue, co-founder and CEO, graduated from École polytechnique and HEC and previously worked at Meta and McKinsey. Christopher Rydahl, co-founder and CTO, was a co-founder of Hublo, the French healthcare staffing software company that had raised €22 million by 2021 and counted more than 2,800 healthcare facilities as clients.
The $20 million round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from existing investors Frst, Y Combinator, and Hexa. Angel investors include Arthur Mensch, CEO of Mistral AI, and Felix Blossier and Quentin de Metz from Pennylane.
“The speed with which hospitals see the real impact of Parallel’s AI agents has been truly impressive,” said Julia Andre, Partner at Index Ventures, in a statement. “AI agents present a huge opportunity for hospitals across the entire patient lifecycle, ensuring time and resources are invested where it matters the most.”
The company says its agents are already deployed across several dozen public and private hospitals in France, though that figure comes from Parallel’s own communications and has not been independently verified.
The administrative share of healthcare spending is widely estimated at around 25–30% of total expenditure, driven by ageing populations, increasing regulatory requirements, and legacy IT infrastructure that makes automation difficult.
Parallel was previously known as Kiosk Medical.
It entered Y Combinator’s programme in 2024, which provided early validation and the US network useful for an eventual international expansion. one of the stated uses of the new capital alongside the Netherlands, Belgium, and other European markets where similar hospital administrative structures apply.
The company is hiring to support that expansion, adding engineering, clinical, and commercial headcount. The bet, plainly stated, is that a startup that can make hospital paperwork faster and cheaper is one that every European health system has an urgent reason to call.
