Courtesy of Lucis
For most people in Europe, getting a clear picture of their health still means waiting until something goes wrong.
Routine blood tests are often limited, hard to access, or triggered only once symptoms appear. Going further — testing hormones, inflammation, cardiometabolic risk or nutrient levels — usually means navigating private clinics, paying hundreds of euros out of pocket, or interpreting raw lab results without much guidance. Even for people actively trying to look after their health, accessing meaningful biomarker data that goes beyond your Oura ring saying you slept badly can be difficult.
That gap is what Paris-based startup Lucis is trying to close, and it has just raised $8.5m in a funding round led by General Catalyst to accelerate its mission.
Founded in January this year, Lucis positions itself as a preventative health platform designed to make regular, data-driven check-ups easier to access in Europe. Rather than acting as a replacement for doctors, the company offers two in-depth health check-ups per year, built around blood tests and urine and saliva samples, analysed through an AI-supported platform and reviewed by clinicians.
The company went through Y Combinator this summer, discussions with investors began in the week leading up to Demo Day and the round was closed just five days later. YC, Kima Ventures, Motier Ventures, Circle.Co, North South Ventures and more than 20 angel investors, including founders from Airbyte and CoScreen also participated in the round, though the bulk of the funding came from General Catalyst.
None of the three founders come from a traditional medical background, but CEO Maxime Berthelot tells me his interest in health, longevity and data-driven self-improvement goes back more than 15 years. “We’ve been seeing the struggle and the burden of having access to real data about your health, especially around biomarkers like blood draws,” he says. “It’s super challenging in Europe right now.”
He concedes it’s slightly easier in the UK, than in countries like France. With companies like Thriva, which launched at home blood testing kits in 2016, saw a boom during the pandemic and has raised £11m total, there are definitely existing options in this space.
Also in the UK, Qured raised £620k earlier this year to reduce workplace sickness with preventative healthcare. In the US, where there is arguably the biggest demand for preventative health checks, LetsGetChecked raised $165m in funding at the start of 2025. In much of Europe, there are fewer options.
Lucis partners with a network of laboratories where users go for testing, while the platform aggregates and interprets results across more than 180 biomarkers. These markers are then checked against Lucis’ internal database, with AI used to flag risks, trends and anomalies. Users receive clinician notes alongside personalised action plans covering nutrition, exercise, supplements, sleep, recovery and mental health.
Berthelot is careful to stress that Lucis is not a medical platform in the traditional sense. Instead, it sits somewhere between consumer wellness and clinical care, aiming to detect potential issues earlier rather than diagnose disease.
Dr. Julien Do Vale joined the team as chief medical officer three months ago, while continuing his work in urgent care.
“He was really concerned about the condition of people coming into the hospital,” Berthelot says, “and he felt many times that if those people were taken care of earlier in their journey he could have saved them and he was really frustrated about that.”
He now works alongside a team of five doctors who helped build the platform with Lucis’ engineers and data scientists, as well as two full-time employees with medical backgrounds.
Lucis operates on a subscription model, priced at €490 per year for two check-ups — a figure Berthelot acknowledges is still inaccessible for many, but significantly cheaper than most private preventative testing options in Europe. The company is also exploring partnerships with insurance providers as it looks to broaden access.
While preventative health has long been a niche interest, Lucis initially grew out of a community fascinated by the longevity movement. The company started by building online groups — now totalling around 30,000 people across WhatsApp and Discord — sparked by rising interest in figures like Bryan Johnson and his highly public, data-driven health experiments.
“It all started when [Johnson] started to get a lot of PR in Europe and he started to get famous and we were very very interested in the part of the data-driven mindset where he shared every detail online and he shared his experimentation with his own doctors and so people got interested in his blueprint,” he said.
That’s how the community started, but now it has expanded to be more mainstream, and that shift is reflected in Lucis’ user base. Around 40% are longevity enthusiasts or biohackers, while 60% are just people interested in monitoring their health. Still, these users skew health-conscious: 85% exercise daily, 77% take dietary supplements and most connect wearables like Whoop, Oura or Garmin to the platform.
Lucis currently operates in France, the UK, Ireland and Portugal, with plans to expand further across Europe with the fresh funding. The company has grown from three founders and two freelancers to a team of 17 in Paris in just six months.
The long-term ambition is to make biomarker testing routine — “as easy as brushing your teeth”, Berthelot says.
Demand for deeper insight into personal health is clearly no longer confined to the fringes, but is there a risk of leaning into the longevity niche too strongly and even putting off regular people who might be sceptical of the Bryan Johnsons of the world?
Berthelot believes the broader trend toward preventative health won’t fade as a passing obsession. “Longevity was the spark that triggered the revolution,” he says. “But now it’s going mainstream.”
Company data:
Founders: Maxime Berthelot (CEO), Baptiste Debever (CTO) and Max Guerois