moveUP Since the EIC Accelerator: Rehab App Merged Into Cascador

moveUP, a Brussels company founded in 2015, sells an app and wristband that guide patients through rehabilitation after a knee or hip replacement, with a physiotherapist watching the data remotely. In the EIC Accelerator pilot's March 2020 cut-off, the European Commission put it on its list of selected COVID-19-related projects as "moveUP c.v.b.a.", grant only, for EXPANSE, the "European Expansion of moveUP". The list names no other company for the project. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €1,724,137 towards a total cost of €2,587,625, for a project that ran from 1 August 2020 to 31 July 2022 with one goal: to "adapt and certify its therapy in 4 target countries".

Six years on, Belgium pays for the app on a permanent basis and the EIC Fund is listed as an investor. No other country's public health system is reported to pay for it, and on 30 April 2026 moveUP's shareholders handed the company to Cascador Health, a Ghent-area digital health firm, in what both sides call a merger. The legal entity, MoveUP NV, still exists, but its only director is now Cascador Health BV, according to the Belgian company register.

What moveUP Is Today

The merger announcement, dated 3 June 2026 in Brussels and Ghent, says the two firms will operate as "Cascador/moveUP", with 35 staff in Brussels and Ghent, work for 8 of the top 10 global drug makers, including AstraZeneca, Sanofi, UCB and argenx, and more than 100,000 patients supported. Investors from both companies put in €6 million of fresh capital. Cascador's co-founder Philip Taillieu is chief executive; moveUP's co-founder Charles-Eric Winandy became chief revenue officer. The investor Qbic and the deal site M&A Belgium carry the same figures, all taken from the release; none has been independently checked.

The filings show what the merger meant in law. A notarial deed of 30 April 2026, published in the Belgian Official Gazette, accepted the resignation of five moveUP directors, among them the fund Karista and Winandy, and appointed Cascador Health BV as sole director; the deed records a declaration by the company's "enige aandeelhouder", its sole shareholder. Several of the departing moveUP directors joined the board of Cascador Health on the same day, according to its register entry. moveUP's 2025 annual accounts, filed on 18 September 2026, state that the company "is gefuseerd met Cascador Health BV" (merged with Cascador Health) and "maakt nu deel uit van de Cascador-groep" (now belongs to the Cascador group).

Before the deal, the same shareholders cleaned up the balance sheet. A second deed of 30 April 2026 converted €1,057,753.42 of debt into shares, added €1,199,452.47 in cash, and then cut the capital from €5,376,071.42 to €2,000,000 "ter aanzuivering van geleden verliezen", to absorb past losses. The employee share option plans were cancelled.

The Technology: Rehabilitation Without the Waiting Room

After a joint replacement, most patients see the surgeon again only after six weeks and rehabilitate with a local physiotherapist in between. moveUP replaces part of those visits with an app and an activity wristband: the patient reports pain, medication and exercises, the system adapts the programme, and a physiotherapist and the surgeon see the data and step in when needed. The EXPANSE objective on CORDIS describes "medical device certified machine learning models" that adjust activity level, exercises and medication under clinical supervision. A Dutch orthopaedic surgeon who piloted it called it "de Strava voor mensen met een nieuwe knie", Strava for people with a new knee, in the insurer CZ's customer magazine.

The difference from ordinary telerehabilitation apps lies less in the software than in reimbursement. In July 2020 Belgium's health insurer INAMI-RIZIV set up a scheme in which the app was paid for patients who joined a trial in 15 hospitals, and moveUP Coach was the only app eligible, according to Med Tech Reimbursement Consulting. The Belgian health technology agency KCE describes the same arrangement as a 2020 "managed entry agreement" in its project record. Today the platform also covers heart failure, cancer, obesity and lung disease, according to its listing on mHealthBelgium. The merged company presents itself first as a partner to drug companies, for clinical trials, real-world data and patient support programmes.

What EXPANSE Promised, and What the Record Shows

The objective was written in the first weeks of the pandemic: "2020 will be remembered as year zero of tele-medicine." It promised three things: to adapt and certify the therapy in four target countries, to run large-scale pilots that prove efficacy and health economic benefit, and to sign partnerships with strategic partners to gain scale. The final periodic report, for August 2021 to July 2022, is three sentences long on results: the platform "has been reworked to be compatible with an international context", "pilots have been kicked off in the Netherlands, France, and Germany", and "a large scale, multi centred randomised control trial has been launched". It does not name the fourth country, report pilot outcomes or mention certification outside Belgium.

1. Platform adapted for other countriesDeliveredLanguages, interoperability and regulation reworked, per the CORDIS report; CORDIS lists a Paris affiliate, MOVEUP.CARE, as a third party.
2. Pilots in other marketsPartlyPilots began in the Netherlands, France and Germany; the Dutch one at Amphia in Breda planned 600 patients from November 2020, per CZ. No outcomes published.
3. Therapy certified and adopted in four countriesNot achievedNo national reimbursement outside Belgium has been announced; La Libre reported one Dutch insurer paying in 2021. MDR class IIa came in 2025.
4. Large trial proving efficacy and economic benefitPartly416-patient Belgian trial completed May 2023, but no results are posted on ClinicalTrials.gov and the KCE report was still listed as ongoing.
5. Strategic partnerships to gain scalePartlyPharma clients such as Sanofi, AstraZeneca and Amgen are named by the company; the scale came through a merger, not a partner.

The trial is the piece that matters most and is hardest to judge. Registered as NCT04628468 by Ghent University Hospital, with INAMI and KCE as collaborators, it randomised 416 patients across Belgian hospitals between 18 January 2021 and 29 May 2023 to test whether rehabilitation with the app is equal to standard care. The KCE assessment that uses its data had an anticipated publication date of 2026 in the international HTA database; no report could be found by October 2026. moveUP's own validation page calls the initial findings "promising" and mentions "over 1000 patients", a figure that does not match the registry's 416. The company does not explain the difference.

What moveUP Achieved After the Grant

The clearest win is at home. In February 2025 moveUP was one of seven apps that reached level 3+ of the Belgian validation pyramid, meaning permanent reimbursement, for remote monitoring of chronic heart failure, according to Med Tech Reimbursement Consulting; in April 2026 it was added for remote monitoring of cancer patients (same source). Its mHealthBelgium page lists three care processes with definitive reimbursement: heart failure, telemonitoring by a physiotherapist, and cancer. In September 2025 the company said it had obtained class IIa certification under the EU Medical Device Regulation for knee and hip arthroplasty, COPD and obesity surgery applications; it does not name the notified body, and no second source for the certificate could be found.

The money followed the grant. In May 2021 moveUP raised €3.65 million in a round led by the French fund Karista and the Belgian White Fund, with Nina Capital, CAREvolution, Qbic, Brustart and Sambrinvest, according to La Libre and Global University Venturing. Both put the EIC grant at €2.7 million, more than the €1,724,137 that CORDIS records; the CORDIS figure is the signed EU contribution. La Libre also reported revenue above €250,000 in 2020, reimbursement by one of the four big Dutch insurers, and plans to study the US market.

A second raise followed in 2023. The Gazette shows capital increases in January and June 2023, and the 2023 accounts show a share premium of €4,226,950.26 that did not exist a year earlier. The bylaws adopted in January 2023 give the "EIC Fund (zolang zij aandelen aanhoudt)", the EIC Fund for as long as it holds shares, the right to appoint a board observer. The same deed appointed Ciaran McCourt, a US-based executive later named as chief executive, to the board. The EIC Fund lists moveUP in its official portfolio (page 11 of the invested companies list), unusual for a grant-only award; the amount and date of its investment are not public.

In March 2025 moveUP announced an agreement to buy Deep Structure.ai, a US company founded in 2018 whose AI, Eunice, builds "digital phenotypes" of orthopaedic patients, to grow in the United States; HIT Consultant reported the deal without terms. Whether it closed could not be verified: the 2025 accounts list only two holdings, b.clinic and MoveUp.Care SAS, and the merger release does not mention Deep Structure. In EU research, moveUP is a partner in PROBE, a €26.4 million osteoarthritis data project led by Erasmus MC that started in December 2025, with a net EU contribution of €147,500.

The Money

moveUP files abbreviated accounts, which give a gross margin but no turnover. They show a company that grew its team, never turned a profit and ran down its cash. The gross margin went from €213,233 in 2020 to minus €880,601 in 2023 and back up to €860,733 in 2025. The net loss peaked at €1,889,856 in 2023. Average staff rose from 5.3 FTE in 2020 to 18.4 in 2023, then fell to 12.2 in 2025, according to the filings with the National Bank of Belgium. La Libre's figure of 25 staff in 2021 is much higher than the 8.8 average FTE in the 2021 accounts; part of the difference may be staff in subsidiaries or contractors, which the sources do not show.

At the end of 2025 moveUP held €273,389 in cash against €411,204 of short-term debt, plus €400,000 drawn on a €500,000 convertible loan from EIT Health that EIT Health turned into a non-repayable grant in April 2026. The accounts' going-concern note rests on three things: the merger with Cascador, new capital from both companies' investors and a cash forecast.

Why Europe Should Care

EXPANSE was an EU bet on a problem the project itself named: "the fragmentation of the European Healthcare markets makes it more difficult for a start-up to scale". The EU's answer to that problem in data is the European Health Data Space regulation, in force since 26 March 2025, which is meant to create a single market for electronic health record systems and let patients share their data across borders, with key parts applying from March 2029. Reimbursement, however, stays national, and moveUP's record shows what that means for a small firm: one country where the insurer paid, a trial run with public bodies, and pilots elsewhere that did not turn into reimbursement.

The Verdict

moveUP and Cascador Health have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.