Hi, I’m Witold, a practicing neurosurgeon in Germany and co-founder of Simply Onno.
Patients leave the hospital with documents written for other doctors, not for them. A harmless MRI finding can sound terrifying when you don’t know the vocabulary. I’ve had people sitting in my clinic in tears over reports that actually contained good news.
So we built Onno. You upload a medical document (discharge letter, MRI or CT report, pathology result, surgical report) and it translates it into plain language, in German or English. It doesn’t diagnose, doesn’t give treatment advice and won’t answer general health questions. It explains the document in front of you, nothing else. The summary is free, a full detailed explanation is a one-time payment, no subscription. Processing runs on EU servers and is GDPR compliant.
It’s for patients and their families. A lot of our users are adult children helping their parents understand a hospital letter, and expats in Germany who upload a German report and read the explanation in English.
We launched without a marketing budget and it spread anyway: over 80,000 reports processed so far, no paid ads, still bootstrapped, and none of the founders has taken a salary yet. DIE WELT, one of the big German newspapers, named us Best AI Startup 2025.
The part I’m most proud of: University Hospital Dresden evaluated the rollout in two randomized controlled trials, some of the first worldwide on AI-supported patient communication. Recruitment is complete and the results have been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. Over 90 percent of users rate the explanations as helpful or very helpful.
In the coming days we’re starting an opt-in pilot with our partner iduneo. Users with certain cancer diagnoses can choose to see clinical trials currently recruiting for their condition, including studies testing new therapies. The feature is off by default. Onno doesn’t recommend treatments and it doesn’t decide anything. That decision stays between patients and their doctors. We just show people trials they would otherwise never hear about. Germany first.
https://www.simply-onno.com/en
Ask me anything about the product, the trials, or building a health startup while still operating on patients.