Update October 2025: Smart Reporting has since been renamed Jacobian.
Smart Reporting is a digital health startup from Munich. In 2017, the young company received a Financing in the millionsThe founder, Wieland Sommer, is himself a radiologist and professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He founded the company in 2015 because he hadn't found a suitable solution to one of the major problems facing physicians. He tells us what it's all about in an interview.
1. Who are you and what do you do?
While the advances in medicine are remarkable, it's all the more astonishing that, despite all these developments, certain workflows have remained unchanged over the past hundred years. Handwritten changes are made to a patient's medical record, or medical findings are typed or, at best, dictated.
But every chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and so important data gets lost and can no longer be used. Everyone talks about AI and machine learning, but dictation devices and free-text reports are essentially the final stops in the data flow.
Goodbye to dictation machines, digitalization reaches doctor's letters and reports
Our platform digitizes the final analog step in medicine—medical findings and doctor's letters. Instead of free text delivered via microphone, the doctor is guided using intelligent decision trees. This allows all important data to be evaluated, significantly increasing workflow efficiency.
Our Smart Radiology software is also the ideal tool for integrating AI and image analysis algorithms into the radiological workflow – we are writing the medicine of the future.
2. But that's been around for a long time!
Unfortunately not. Many companies are tinkering with isolated solutions. Even though "structured reporting" is well-known, especially in radiology, under the slogan "three radiologists, three different reports," there have only been isolated approaches to date, primarily from the academic world.
This doesn't necessarily mean that these individual findings are wrong or even bad. They are simply different, and this is not only inefficient, but also very difficult to analyze free text.
3. What are the three main ingredients for your recipe for success?
Over the past few years, we have been able to recruit the best talent in the field of machine learning and image recognition, and today we have an excellent team with whom we are working on the topic that most people only talk about – artificial intelligence in medicine.
We've created a platform solution that can be integrated into all common hospital IT systems and is multilingual. This has resulted in a huge increase in users worldwide. We're already being used in over 50 different countries.
And last but not least, the icing on the cake is that, as the founder, I'm a medical doctor myself and know our clients' needs from my own practice. This enabled us to gain a lot of trust in Smart Reporting right from the start-up phase.
Internationalization allows customer base to grow daily
4. Let’s get down to business: How is business going?
Physicians can register and test the software on our platform. Approximately 30% are already registered among German radiologists. We have several distribution partnerships in Germany with companies such as Agfa, into whose systems we are fully integrated. We are also installed in several renowned university hospitals and are currently working on an international project with Bayer AG.
Since we launched the platform in multiple languages, we have been gaining many new users every day from around the world, especially from the USA, Russia, Brazil, India and China.
5. What does Munich mean to you?
As a spin-off from LMU, Smart Reporting has always had strong ties to Munich. This is where it all began, and where our first customers and cooperation partners, such as Siemens, are located. LMU Entrepreneurship Center also provides us with excellent support.
Today, we share a floor with other startups and have a view of the Stachus square in front and the Alps in the back. That really says it all.
Epic Fail? Smart Reporting prefers to learn from other people's mistakes
6. How will your startup become the next unicorn? Or will we see you soon at Epic Fail Night?
We'll see you at Epic Fail Night – but only as listeners. We don't want to make all the mistakes ourselves, but rather learn from the experiences of others. Because we know: a good idea alone isn't enough to become a unicorn.
7. Either...or question! Pork knuckle or fish on a stick?
I actually quite like both. In the beer garden, though, I prefer grilled fish. Two liters of Helles contain the same number of calories as a pork knuckle.
If you would like to know more, we recommend the Passiomed podcast and the detailed interview with Wieland Sommer there.
