Kahun's EIC Accelerator Project: AI Diagnosis Against Silence

Kahun Medical set out to give every doctor a second opinion: software that takes a patient's symptoms and test results and returns a ranked list of possible diagnoses, with the medical literature behind each one. In the European Innovation Council's COVID-19 round of March 2020 the Tel Aviv start-up was one of the winners, and it received an EU grant of €2,375,498.13 towards a €3,393,568.75 project to finish its app, build a COVID-19 tool and grow its medical knowledge graph, according to CORDIS. The Commission's list of EIC Accelerator pilot winners names Kahun Medical Ltd. alone for the project, with blended finance: a grant plus EIC equity.

The project ran on time and the app shipped. Then the company changed course twice: first to a chatbot that interviews patients before a visit, then to software that structures medical knowledge for generative AI and pharmaceutical companies. Its last announcement that could be found came in September 2024. On 14 October 2026, kahun.com loaded a GoDaddy domain parking page, and the Internet Archive shows the parking redirect in place since December 2025.

Where Kahun Stands Now

Kahun Medical Ltd still exists. The Israeli Corporations Authority's open company register, refreshed on 14 October 2026, lists it as active, incorporated on 8 October 2018, with a registered address care of "Be All" in Givatayim, according to the data.gov.il record. The same record flags it as a "violating company" (חברה מפרה), a flag the open dataset does not explain, and gives 2023 as the last year for which an annual report was filed. OpenCorporates shows the same status and address. Israeli private companies do not publish accounts, so no revenue, loss or staff figures are on file.

Everything else points to a company that has stopped operating in public. The last news item on its own news page, as archived in October 2025, dates from early 2024. The last announcement found anywhere is the launch of an AI agent for pharmaceutical companies, reported by HIT Consultant on 6 September 2024 and by ice on 11 September 2024. The website was still up in November 2025, with a 2024 copyright line, and was parked a month later. No closure, sale or layoffs have been announced, and data provider CB Insights still lists it as alive. With no public activity for more than two years, this article classes Kahun as dormant.

The Technology: A Map of Medicine

Most diagnosis tools either search text or learn patterns from patient records. Kahun built a structured knowledge graph instead: doctors annotated findings from the medical literature, and Bayesian algorithms turned them into probabilistic links between diseases, symptoms, lab results, complications and risk factors. At the time of the application the graph held "more than 3 Million insights", according to the CORDIS objective. NEJM Group put it at "over 20 million connections" in December 2021, and the company gave 30 million in the CORDIS Results in Brief and to MobiHealthNews in 2022. The selling point was explainability: every suggested diagnosis comes with the path from the patient's findings to the sources.

Two peer-reviewed studies tested it, both with authors paid by Kahun. In JMIR Medical Informatics in November 2021, the tool was run on 91 exam-style cases from the US medical licensing exam. Three of the five authors were part-time Kahun employees, while the paper declares no conflicts of interest. The paper is also inconsistent: its text says 231 of 272 expected diagnoses appeared in Kahun's top 20, while its table gives 238. The printed 87.5% matches 238.

The second study, in the International Journal of Medical Informatics in December 2022, compared how well eight symptom-checker chatbots, including Babylon, Ada and K Health, gathered the relevant findings from 28 simulated patients. Kahun came first. The paper says the study was "fully funded" by Kahun Medical, which paid the salaries of four authors, while also declaring no competing interests.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The project ran its planned 24 months, from 1 August 2020 to 31 July 2022. The deliverables on the CORDIS results page were a redesigned version 2.0 of the mobile app with a new way to enter findings, a COVID-19 knowledge map and symptom tool, and "fully approved GDPR compliance". The final periodic report says Kahun "successfully completed all the identified tasks, deliverables and milestones". It counts more than 5,000 medical professionals and over 50,000 consultation sessions on the free app; the Results in Brief, published in December 2022, gives "around 7 000 clinicians".

The COVID-19 work produced a published risk calculator for critical illness. In a validation on 145 patients at one Israeli hospital it identified 17 of 18 who became critically ill, according to the paper in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine, whose authors include four Kahun staff.

The same report records the change of course. The business plan had been to give the app away, grow, then charge for it; instead "the company decided to pivot" and used the graph to power a patient intake chatbot sold to telemedicine companies. The application had projected "total revenues of €207 Million by the end of 2026". No revenue figure has ever been published.

1. App version 2.0 with new data entryDeliveredReleased in the mobile app, per the CORDIS report; the app's accuracy was published in 2021.
2. COVID-19 knowledge map and toolDeliveredRisk calculator validated and published in a peer-reviewed journal.
3. GDPR complianceReportedListed as a deliverable on CORDIS; the document is not public.
4. Expand the graph into more medical fieldsPartialThe graph grew from 3 million to 30 million insights; still focused on internal medicine in 2022, per Maariv.
5. Paid doctor app as the businessDroppedReplaced by a patient intake chatbot, then by pharma tools.
6. €207M revenue by end of 2026Not achievedNo revenue published; no public activity since September 2024.

What Kahun Achieved After the Grant

The private money came soon after the project. In September 2022 Kahun announced an $8 million seed round led by LocalGlobe, with The Founders Kitchen, the fund of Waze co-founder Uri Levine, and the EIC Fund "as part of the EIC Accelerator program", according to Calcalist and Maariv. Both put total funding at $13 million. In September 2024 a Calcalist profile gave $11 million raised and 20 employees, and CB Insights lists $13.57 million; the sources disagree, and no later round has been reported.

Partners followed. NEJM Group, publisher of the New England Journal of Medicine, used Kahun's content to build illness scripts for its NEJM Healer teaching tool from December 2021. US telehealth firm MediOrbis integrated the intake chatbot in December 2022, per MobiHealthNews, and the CORDIS report names HelixVM in the US and HealthBridge, a South African practice software firm serving more than 3,000 clinics. In January 2024 virtual care company ViTel Net announced a partnership linking its vCareCommand platform to Kahun. Kahun's own news page also lists a ChatGPT integration (April 2023, also cited by ice), and deals with Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (August 2023) and the German appointment platform samedi (August 2023); neither of the last two could be confirmed by a second source. Whether any partner paid, and how much, is not public.

Why Europe Should Care

Kahun is an Israeli company, eligible because Israel has been associated to the EU's research programmes since 1996 and signed its Horizon 2020 association on 8 June 2014, according to the European Commission. Its subject sits where EU health and AI policy meet. The European Health Data Space Regulation, in force since 26 March 2025, is meant to make health data usable across borders. The AI Act treats AI that can seriously affect health as high-risk, with strict obligations phased in from 2 December 2027 and 2 August 2028. Kahun's explainable, source-linked approach matches what those rules ask for. But no CE mark for its software could be found, and its European footprint beyond the grant amounts to one unconfirmed German partnership.

The Verdict

Kahun Medical and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.