Some roles and skills may not put those who perform them in the spotlight, yet they are no less valuable—indeed, sometimes essential. The ICURE team clearly belongs to this category. The company provides support to the digital health innovation sector.
“Our target clients are companies developing medical applications and producing health data,” explains Eric Krzeslo, CEO of ICURE Belgium. “We provide everything that lies behind their applications—storage, security, interoperability. Our goal is to give time back to innovation by supplying all this IT ‘plumbing’, this essential ‘mechanical’ layer required to bring digital health solutions to market.”
Security, storage, interoperability
At the helm of Cardinal, ICURE’s technology platform and backend service, are specialists deeply familiar with the complexities of e-health and its latest developments. Their service enables companies to offload the restrictive, time-consuming—and therefore costly—task of developing code required to comply with increasingly stringent legal and regulatory requirements.
It guarantees an extremely high level of data security, combined with storage and maintenance, while ensuring interoperability. “Secure interoperability between doctors, primary care and hospital care, between the healthcare sector and public authorities—although delicate to implement—has become absolutely essential to improving the efficiency of care,” stresses Eric Krzeslo.
Constant evolution
ICURE benefits from solid experience accumulated since Antoine Duchateau—an engineer from a family of doctors, and the company’s future founder and CTO—started working about fifteen years ago on the development of a comprehensive patient medical record for primary care, for which he designed a specific backend.
“Gradually, the activity evolved from a B2C product into the commercialization of a technology platform,” recounts Eric Krzeslo. “We wanted to find a way to contribute to accelerating digital health innovation. We abandoned the application in favor of the backend, which we turned into a product—a higher-quality service. Our clients are no longer doctors, but specialists in medical application development, who in turn bring their innovations to doctors, patients, and hospitals, all of whom can also use our services.”
Knowledge sharing in all its forms
Circumstances meant that ICURE officially came into being administratively in 2021—first in Switzerland, then in Belgium in 2025—but it has always worked with Belgian teams and is firmly established in the country. The company is also well integrated into the Brussels entrepreneurial ecosystem, notably through ongoing relationships with the lifetech.brussels cluster.
“As someone familiar with the biomedical sector, I’ve known and appreciated the cluster for a long time,” notes ICURE’s CEO. “More precisely since Mintt—a Brussels-based company specializing in fall prevention and detection that I co-founded—took part in the MedTech Accelerator in 2018. Since then, I’ve maintained excellent contacts with the team, which does outstanding work. The cluster’s broad openness to digital health and medical technology as a whole is particularly interesting, while biotech activity is more prevalent in Flanders and Wallonia. ‘Lifetech’ refers to life technology, which includes both biotech and medtech. As a result, I’m always delighted to share time and experience with other young companies.”
At ICURE, the commitment to sharing goes even further: the Cardinal platform is an open-source product, freely available to all startups. Revenue is generated from companies with more substantial commercial activity, allowing them predictable cost structures.
It’s a winning formula, according to the CEO: “The company is already profitable and growing rapidly, without external investors—which is not necessarily common in the tech world. Our customer base is significant, and the volume of data secured by Cardinal is considerable in Belgium and Switzerland. Thanks to this, Cardinal’s technology is extremely robust and well proven.”
An eye on the future
More recently, ICURE has also established itself in France, where it already holds the HDS (Health Data Hosting) certification, in addition to its ISO 27001 and ISO 13485 certifications. Next, the company intends to expand into other European countries and is targeting the United States.
“We have real added value there,” confides Eric Krzeslo, “to respond to the growing awareness among American citizens of the importance of securing health data. But also to bring our guarantees in terms of anonymization and security to a country that is very open to exploiting health data from multiple sources.”
ICURE’s future looks very promising, notably thanks to artificial intelligence—a truly exciting revolution for Eric Krzeslo. “This is true for research, which AI significantly accelerates,” he enthuses, “as well as for application development—the tools accessible to doctors and their patients. From now on, it will take only a few weeks instead of several months or even years to develop an application. It’s a genuine revolution for our clients. But none of this is secure or interoperable, which represents a fantastic opportunity for ICURE, faced with an explosion in the need for health data security and interoperability.”