Hospitals are leaving money on the table every month. They just don’t know how much. We sat down with co-founder Andrej Matić, alongside Kristijan Šarac and Goran Ristić, to find out how MEDIQCODE™ built a product that fixes that, won first place at BIRD Demo Day in April, and landed a live pilot in the Middle East before turning one year old.
Who are you, what’s the name and age of your startup, and what problem are you solving?
I’m Andrej, co-founder of MEDIQCODE™, a healthtech company from Zagreb founded in May 2025, so we’re just over a year old. I lead the business side; Goran, our CTO, owns the technology, and Kristijan, our COO, runs operations and delivery.
We solve a problem most hospitals don’t know they have: they are systematically underpaid for care they already deliver. In every DRG-based health system, hospitals are reimbursed by case complexity, and complexity is determined entirely by how the case is coded. Coding is still done manually, often by overloaded staff with no view of the financial consequence, so secondary diagnoses and comorbidities get missed, and the hospital is paid for a simpler case than the one it treated. MEDIQCODE reads the discharge letter, extracts diagnoses and procedures, proposes the codes, predicts the DRG in real time, and flags what was missed.
How did you first connect with BIRD Incubator, and what made you decide to join the program?
I already knew BIRD from the inside. My previous startup, Recre, went through the program, so when we founded MEDIQCODE in May 2025, there was no real decision to make. I had seen what BIRD does well: it understands B2B sales into slow, regulated buyers, and hospitals are about as slow and regulated as buyers get.
We joined the incubation program in October 2025, roughly five months after founding. We didn’t need another pitch bootcamp; we had a working product, a proof of concept in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and partner conversations already running in the Middle East. What we needed was help turning one successful PoC into a repeatable process we could run in any DRG market, with partners on the ground, while using Croatia as our testing ground close to home. The timing was right: we were moving from “does the technology work” to “how do we get a hospital director to sign”.
Every startup faces challenges. What’s been your toughest obstacle so far, and how did you overcome it?
The hospital sales cycle, and the fact that it’s a different animal in every country. In healthtech, the product is rarely the bottleneck; the buying process is. A hospital pilot involves the director, the CFO, the head of coding, IT and, indirectly, the payer, and every one of them has a different reason to say “not now”. Our first conversations dragged for months, with everyone agreeing the idea was great.
Two things changed it. First, we stopped selling the technology and started selling the number: we take a hospital’s own anonymised cases, run them through the platform, and come back with a concrete figure for how much reimbursement they left on the table last month. That turns a polite meeting into a budget conversation, because now not acting has a price. Second, we stopped trying to open foreign markets alone. In the Middle East, we work through distribution partners who already have the hospital and ministry relationships, and we bring the product, the DRG logic and the proof. That combination is what took us from a PoC in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where uplift exceeded 30%, to a live hospital pilot in the Middle East today.
What’s one resource, connection, or experience at BIRD Incubator that truly made a difference in your startup’s growth?
Two things. First, the mentors. We came into BIRD with a clear structure: Goran on technology, Kristijan on operations, me on business, but in the early months we were still selling the algorithm. The mentors pushed us on the parts we’d been avoiding: how a hospital actually budgets, how a pilot becomes a contract, and how to structure pricing so the finance director sees a return rather than a cost. That work shaped the pricing tiers we use today for different hospital sizes, the revenue-share option we offer, and the way we structure partner agreements abroad.
A good mentor doesn’t tell you the answer; they ask the question you’ve been avoiding.
Second, the program sessions on go-to-market and financial modelling. They forced us to build the business case from the hospital’s side, from the CFO’s spreadsheet rather than our model, and that discipline is now in every proposal, every partner term sheet, and every investor conversation we have, in whichever country we’re pitching.
What makes your business model stand out, and who are your target customers?
The incentives are aligned in a way that’s rare in hospital software. Our customers are hospitals, from university clinical centres to general and specialist hospitals, and the decision makers are the director, the CFO, and the head of coding. The model is a monthly subscription plus implementation, but because the value shows up in the hospital’s own reimbursement data within weeks, we can also offer a revenue-share model where we’re paid from the uplift we create. We’re not selling a cost; we’re selling a return visible in the next settlement with the payer.
What makes the model scale is that every DRG-based system has the same undercoding problem, so we go to market through local distribution partners: they bring the hospital, ministry and payer relationships, we bring the platform, the DRG logic and the proof, and we share the revenue. That’s how we’re working in Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf today, where our first hospital pilot in the region is already running, and it’s the template for the larger European DRG markets next. Beyond hospitals, the same engine is relevant to insurers for claims review and to hospital IT vendors as an integration layer.
Where do you see your startup in five years, and what goals are you most excited to achieve?
In five years, I want MEDIQCODE to be the standard revenue layer that sits between clinical documentation and reimbursement in every DRG-based health system we operate in, not a tool people open, but infrastructure that’s simply on.
We’re building this as an international company from day one: our commercial work is mostly abroad, with a pilot already running in the Middle East, distribution partners in Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf, and a clear path into the large European DRG markets, starting with the German-speaking countries, while Croatia is where we test and refine close to home. Concretely, five years out means a validated presence across the GCC through our partners, a foothold in at least one major EU market, and a product that hospitals treat as part of their financial core.
Fixing the money is how we earn the right to fix the data.
What’s one piece of advice from your journey that you believe every founder should know?
Sell the loss, not the feature. Nobody buys “AI-powered system for medical coding”. People act when they see a specific number they are currently losing and realise it has been walking out the door every month. Find that number for your customer, put it in front of the person who owns the budget, and let them do the maths.
The second thing: in regulated markets, patience is a strategy, not a weakness. A hospital deal that takes a year is not a failure; it’s the moat. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.
And finally, surround yourself with people who will tell you what you don’t want to hear early. At BIRD, we got that, and it saved us months.
Follow MEDIQCODE™’s journey here.
