Born as a FemTech, Geen.ai uses artificial intelligence to direct people towards the care pathway best suited to their needs.
Has it ever happened to you that you've had a pain coming and going for months and you can't describe it well, not even in front of a doctor? Or that you've left an appointment with a prescription in hand, without really knowing who to turn to from that point on? It happens more often than we think, because the first obstacle when seeking health support is almost never the absence of a service — it's knowing how to navigate: understanding which doors to knock on, and in which order.
A difficulty that weighs even more heavily when getting an appointment takes months. According to the first Agenas bulletin on waiting lists, in Italy in the first half of 2026 bookings for first appointments and diagnostic tests rose from 13.3 to 14.9 million. Compliance with guarantee timeframes improved, but over 2.2 million services were still delivered beyond the established thresholds.
And if, after such a long wait, the booked appointment doesn't match the most appropriate specialty, the whole process risks starting over — with new costs and further delays in receiving care. The key word is therefore appropriateness: increasing the likelihood that a person is directed from the outset towards the service most consistent with their need.
It is from this difficulty that Geen.ai was born, a startup founded by Giulia Marchese and Lucia Vernino. Giulia Marchese is a data scientist who has worked on predictive models, the gender data gap and healthcare access for vulnerable populations; Lucia Vernino has worked in marketing and communications, primarily on sustainability and gender equality issues.
Their skills were also brought together by two personal experiences: Giulia's pregnancy and Lucia's more than ten years of living with a chronic condition. "The problem wasn't the lack of medical expertise around us. It was knowing who to turn to, at which point in the journey and with what information," they explain. This is how they began to see, behind what seemed like individual difficulties, a broader limitation: the way people enter the healthcare system and manage — or fail — to navigate it.
Geen.ai is not an app aimed directly at the public, but a technology designed for healthcare companies, insurers and other sector operators. It integrates into their systems to help those managing bookings and care pathways to direct people towards the most suitable service. In some cases, it can also be used by citizens and policyholders through the channels of the organisation that adopts it.
The system receives requests expressed in natural language, translates them into clinical terms and cross-references them with guidelines, care pathways and scientific evidence. If it identifies a pathway supported by the sources, it proposes it; when there is more than one alternative, the language model selects and explains the recommendation solely from among the options validated by the graph.
The difference from a search engine lies in its ability to connect the need expressed by the person to the concrete organisation of services. "Geen.ai guides towards the most appropriate specialist or care pathway, but it does not formulate diagnoses and does not replace the doctor," the founders clarify. In urgent cases it directs people towards emergency services, while diagnosis and treatment remain the responsibility of healthcare professionals.
To measure impact, Geen.ai uses as its primary indicator the time to care — that is, the time between the emergence of a need and appropriate care uptake. Other metrics vary depending on the client: pathway appropriateness for a healthcare facility, use of the affiliated network for an insurer, speed of access for a welfare programme: "For us, time to care is not a promise — it is the concrete measure of the value Geen.ai generates."
Geen.ai's first product was born in the field of female sexual and reproductive health, the area in which Marchese and Vernino had gained the most direct experience. Here they had observed fragmented pathways, little clarity about which professionals to involve, and needs that were still poorly represented in data and services.
This perspective led the startup to confront a broader problem: for a long time, medicine has taken as its reference point a standard patient, often adult and male. If an artificial intelligence system is built on unbalanced knowledge, it risks reproducing those same limitations. "For us this is not a positioning issue, but a question of system quality. If a model is built on unrepresentative data or operates on stereotypes, it simply navigates worse," the founders explain. The same condition can manifest differently depending on gender, age or other clinically relevant characteristics: failing to account for this can produce unnecessary consultations and longer times to receive care. Equity thus also becomes a condition for efficiency.
From the experience in women's health came the evolution into an infrastructure usable by healthcare companies, insurers and public bodies, but the perspective developed in that first field remains central: "FemTech was our starting point, not our destination. Working on women's health allowed us to observe at close quarters how the under-representation of certain needs in data and care pathways can translate into less precise navigation and harder access to care. And it taught us that a technology is truly effective only when it is designed to represent the complexity of the people who will use it. Today, that perspective has become a design principle that makes the system more accurate for everyone."
Geen.ai was selected for Women in Action, the acceleration programme run by LifeGate Way dedicated to startups founded by women. For Giulia and Lucia, the programme came at a time when the company's direction was still being defined, but its value proved itself above all over time: "These programmes don't end with the demo day: they build relationships that continue to create opportunities even years later."
The point, they add, is not to create a separate ecosystem, but to reduce barriers to access — to networks, skills and opportunities — making female entrepreneurs and professionals more visible. "The more people with different experiences and perspectives reach the places where decisions are made and innovation is built, the greater the likelihood that ideas and solutions which would otherwise remain invisible will emerge," they conclude.
