Healthcare Software Buyers Have No G2 – Someone Is Building It

01 /The Concept

Elion is a marketplace where healthcare organizations can compare the software tools available to them and make informed purchasing decisions.

On the vendor side, software developers get direct exposure to potential buyers, plus insights into how purchasing decisions are actually being made – which criteria matter, and how buyers weigh them.

Elion indexes all software products relevant to healthcare. Developers can optionally claim and verify their listing – correcting any inaccuracies and unlocking a direct channel to prospective clients who express interest in their product.

The marketplace is organized into a detailed catalog. A healthcare organization can navigate to the category they care about – say, patient CRM – and see every product on the market for that use case, with enough detail to evaluate each one.

The listing structure is layered:

- First section: company overview, founding year, headcount, total funding, headquarters location, social media links.

- Second section: key differentiators versus competitors, use case descriptions, links to live demos.

- Third section: a list of verified current users from the healthcare sector, with their practice types, staff sizes, and average tenure on the software.

- Fourth section: comparable alternatives with brief descriptions and links to full listings.

If questions remain after reviewing a listing, organizations can connect with an Elion specialist in one click – someone who can provide additional guidance and help narrow the field.

Elion has indexed over 1,500 products across 138 categories. The startup also claims that more than 60% of US healthcare organizations are now active on the platform.

Elion just closed a new $9.3M round. The prior round – its first – was $3.3M raised in fall 2022.

02 /Why It Matters

Why did investors get interested in Elion again three years later? Because comparison marketplaces like this one have become considerably more valuable. One piece of evidence: healthcare organizations used Elion's platform five times more often in the past year than the year before that.

Two forces are driving that.

The first is AI.

AI has flooded the market with new software products while simultaneously causing existing ones to expand their feature sets dramatically. Keeping track of all of this has become genuinely difficult for buyers.

At the same time, as one Elion customer put it: "We can't buy new software just because it has AI in it. Every purchase needs to be justified on ROI grounds."

The stakes have also gotten higher. AI-enabled software can now influence genuinely important decisions – including helping clinicians diagnose patients or recommend treatment plans. That level of consequence demands more rigorous evaluation, which means more time spent on research, more conversations with existing users, and more consultations with specialists.

The second force is a structural shift in how enterprise buyers behave across all industries, not just healthcare. Buyers increasingly prefer to do their own research rather than engage with sales teams. They now conduct roughly 70% of the buying journey independently before speaking with any vendor representative – and by the time they do, 81% of buyers already have a shortlist of 4–5 candidates.

In 90% of cases, the eventual purchase comes from that pre-formed shortlist. What that means in practice: the decisive moment in an enterprise software sale is no longer the sales call – it's getting onto the shortlist during the self-research phase.

Elion is exactly the tool buyers use to build those shortlists – which makes it a critical node in the sales funnel for healthcare software vendors.

Stackfix ([related review](/review/pomogi-im-pokupat-na-1-trillion-dollarov-v-god)) raised £2.4M to occupy the same position in broader B2B software categories – CRM, recruiting platforms, project management, helpdesk, marketing automation. Its key differentiator: AI handles the comparisons, and domain experts review and refine the outputs, keeping everything current as products evolve.

Sagetap ([covered here](/review/ne-pomogaj-prodavat-luchshe-pomogi-pokupat)) raised $12.5M for a marketplace with a more interactive mechanic: an AI recommends matching products, buyers can then reach out to vendors anonymously with questions about functionality and use cases – and only reveal their identity to the vendors who make their shortlist.

All three of these startups, like Elion, make money on commissions earned when purchases close through their platforms.

03 /Opportunities

B2B sales dynamics have shifted meaningfully. Most enterprise buyers are now doing their own research and largely ignoring cold outreach from sales teams.

That means modern B2B software vendors urgently need platforms and tools that let them influence the self-research process – so their products have a better chance of landing on the shortlists buyers are building.

A cluster of startups has emerged to serve different parts of this new funnel:

- Boosting visibility in social media – Rocksalt.

- Getting recommended in AI chat responses – Evertune.

- Helping buyers independently compare product options – Stackfix ([related review](/review/pomogi-im-pokupat-na-1-trillion-dollarov-v-god)).

- Making vendor websites more persuasive to enterprise buyers – Brand Stori.

- Turning existing customers into advocates for new ones – Deeto.

- Creating interactive product demos – Olto.

Each of those areas also has comparable players worth exploring.

So the broader direction here: build platforms that help B2B software vendors get their products in front of buyers during the self-research phase.

But Elion's story points to an additional opportunity: for every one of these horizontal platforms, there's likely room for a vertical equivalent – purpose-built for a specific industry, the way Elion is purpose-built for healthcare. Two advantages come with that specialization:

- Vertical platforms can deliver more value through tighter focus – they can surface the features and criteria that matter most in a specific industry context.

- Buyers within a specific industry tend to trust specialized platforms more than generalist ones, precisely because they expect more relevant, detailed information.

This multiplies the opportunity space considerably – one horizontal concept, applied across dozens of industries.

Which concept, in which specific industry, seems compelling enough to actually build?