OTEO raises €1.2M to scale hospital-to-hotel care coordination across France

OTEO (Annecy) has closed a €1.2 million round led by makesense seed II, with participation from 50 Partners Santé, the INSEAD Business Angels and BADGE networks, along with Bpifrance, Crédit Agricole des Savoie, and CIC. Co-founders Léa Jakubowicz (CEO) and Elsa Kiefer (CTO) retain a majority stake. The capital goes toward three priorities: interoperability with hospital information systems, automated eligible-patient identification, and commercial team expansion.

Founded in Annecy in 2023, OTEO builds the operational infrastructure for France's hébergement temporaire non médicalisé (HTNM) — the hôtel hospitalier mechanism that allows eligible patients to stay in a partner hotel rather than occupying a hospital bed when overnight medical supervision is not required. The platform has reached 15 hospitals deployed and 10,000 patient nights managed since launch.

The operational gap the platform fills

Hospital beds are a finite resource, but not every patient who occupies one needs to be there overnight. A patient with an early procedure who lives two hours away, a chemotherapy patient returning for a sixth session, a post-operative discharge unable to travel immediately — these are care-pathway patients who need proximity to the hospital, not medical monitoring.

France's HTNM framework, established in 2021 and updated in 2026, allows hospitals to prescribe these stays and bill the Assurance Maladie at a standard tariff: €73 per night across most of France, €90 in major metropolitan areas. The gap between the regulation and its use is not legal — it is organisational. Hospitals lack tools to identify eligible patients at booking, find and confirm hotel capacity, communicate logistics to the patient, track the stay administratively, and process the reimbursement — all without adding to an already constrained administrative function. OTEO automates that chain from prescription to settlement.

AP-HP and the credibility signal

The anchor customer is the AP-HP (Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris), Europe's largest public hospital group. OTEO won the AP-HP's first competitive tender for hôtel hospitalier coordination. Six AP-HP hospitals are live — including La Pitié-Salpêtrière, Tenon, and Cochin — with a contracted roll-out to 24 AP-HP hospitals by 2028. Securing the AP-HP is a trust signal in a category where procurement is slow and institutional relationships determine short-list position; it is also an operational reference that private-sector hospital groups — Elsan and Ramsay Santé are named in the pipeline — will inspect before signing.

Hotel-side partners include Accor, B&B Hotels, Adagio, and Louvre Hotels Group, providing geographic coverage across major cities, regional centres, and the overseas territories where OTEO has also begun working.

"Our ambition is simple: make the hôtel hospitalier obvious. For the patient, who sleeps better and heals better. For the hospital, which gets its beds back. For society, which saves public money," said Léa Jakubowicz, co-founder and CEO.

The 2030 target — 175 hospitals and 500,000 nights per year — implies roughly an eleven-fold increase from the current estate. The round is sized to prove the model at the AP-HP, not to fund that full journey. A French regional health system that runs the same procurement cycle more quickly is the next expected milestone; the European expansion OTEO mentions (citing comparable HTNM models in Switzerland, Germany, the UK, and Scandinavia) is a longer horizon, contingent on proving the French playbook first.