From an encounter with a disoriented patient to the Health navigator: Alberto Clemenzi recounts the evolution of Salute360, a startup backed by LifeGate Way.
By 2030, Europe could be short of nearly one million healthcare professionals. This is the estimate of the World Health Organization, which in June 2026 drew attention to a shortage driven by the ageing of the population and the healthcare workforce, rising demand for care, and the difficulty of attracting new professionals. In a scenario like this, the challenge is not only to increase resources, but also to use them better: easing the burden on professionals and helping people navigate services and care pathways.
It is precisely from a problem of navigation that the story of Salute360 begins — a digital health company founded by Alberto Clemenzi. During an internship as part of his medical studies, Clemenzi met a 76-year-old woman in hospital. She had a prescription in her hand but had no idea where to go or who to turn to. She asked him for help. "I couldn't answer because I had no means to do so," he tells us. From that unanswered request — a fairly ordinary scene in a hospital — came the question that would lead to Salute360: what happens when treatments exist, but the patient doesn't know how to reach them? The two stayed in touch: years later, that woman would become first a patient and then an angel investor in the startup. A nearly circular trajectory that brings us back to the starting point: not the lack of services, but the difficulty of connecting them.
Clemenzi's background helps explain how that intuition became an entrepreneurial project. From childhood he studied piano up to conservatoire examinations, while nurturing a passion for science and technology. "I grew up in a family where computers were as staple as bread," he recalls. His father, a software engineer, introduced him to coding as a game: by middle school, Clemenzi had already built a digital platform for his school. As he pursued his medical studies, these different worlds began to converge. Clemenzi observed care pathways up close and, with an eye already trained on technology, began asking how digital tools could intervene precisely at the points where the system breaks down.
When we asked him which "gap" in the healthcare system struck him most, his answer was: "fragmentation". "Patients easily get lost — not so much because the tools or services are missing, but because there is discontinuity from one service to the next." According to Clemenzi, this fragmentation risks being further compounded by a growing tendency to build increasingly vertical services, focused on individual needs, specific patient groups or particular moments in the care journey. Clemenzi cites, for example, the phenomenon of drug or test prescriptions that are issued but never used. Behind this can lie doubts or difficulty in understanding what the next step is. And it is when that next step is unclear that people seek answers elsewhere — from search engines to general-purpose artificial intelligence tools. But more information does not necessarily mean better navigation.
It is around this problem that Salute360 has progressively shifted its focus. In the beginning, the pharmacy was the first point in the healthcare journey on which the project chose to intervene, partly because for many citizens it represents one of the first points of access to the system. The team then came to understand that disruptions could occur at any point along the care pathway. Today Salute360 is a digital platform, accessible via app and web, that brings together in a single space a range of services related to the health journey: from information to booking, through to telemedicine and the management of prescriptions and medications. The goal is to create continuity between steps that often remain disconnected.
Among the most recent developments is the Health navigator, an artificial intelligence-based tool designed not to make diagnoses, but to direct the person towards the most appropriate facility or healthcare professional. In practice, a person can describe their need to the system and receive guidance on which structure or healthcare figure to contact. The response is generated on the basis of guidelines and institutional sources and, when it lacks sufficient information, the system is designed not to produce one. There is also a second level of intervention: not only guiding patients, but also simplifying the work of those who assist them. Access to the services is free; the economic model is sustained by digital services offered to doctors, healthcare professionals and pharmacies, also designed to reduce some operational and bureaucratic burdens.
It is also this commitment to social impact that brought Salute360 closer to LifeGate Way, the LifeGate ecosystem dedicated to developing and investing in positive-impact startups. In Salute360's case, the impact runs through access to healthcare: helping people to find information, navigate the system and make better use of available services. "As a company we have a mission to make a difference to people's quality of life, to the way they access information and become aware of their own health," explains Clemenzi. It is this convergence, he says, that accompanied LifeGate Way's recent entry into the company's capital.
The startup is now finalising an investment round of 1.5 million euros, with the aim of closing it by the end of 2026: 500,000 euros have already been raised and the search for the remaining million is still open. The funds will be used to consolidate its presence in Italy, continue technological development and take the first steps towards internationalisation, with Germany among the markets under consideration. Since that first encounter in hospital, Salute360 has grown, expanded its services and its ambitions, but continues to work on the very issue from which everything began: ensuring that, between a prescription and the next step, the patient no longer gets lost. A challenge that is not just about the availability of care, but above all about the ability to connect services and resources and make them genuinely accessible to people.
