Why Pilots Matter: How Bewe and CSS Are Using Real-World Validation to Build Product-System Fit

In our previous article, we followed Bewe’s journey from more than 15 years of neuroscience research to a digital therapeutic with growing market traction. Today, the company has entered a new phase. 

As part of Level 3 of the Future of Health Grant (FoHG), the focus has shifted from proving that the intervention works to understanding how it performs in real-world conditions. 

Over the past year, Bewe has been conducting its first major pilot with CSS. Around 80 insured members have tested the app as part of the insurer’s health coaching program. Building on these learnings, Bewe is running and preparing additional pilots with different stakeholders such as healthcare providers and dieticians, including the FoHG partner Ensemble Hospitalier de la Côte (EHC), to explore how the solution performs in different care environments. 

Pilots are often seen as a box to tick before commercialization. Yet they are a crucial step, where startups and healthcare stakeholders jointly answer some of the most important questions in digital health: 

• Does the solution create value?  
• Can it fit into real-world settings and easily be adopted?  
• Could it realistically be deployed and scaled broadly? 

To better understand what makes a pilot successful, we spoke with Barnabé Delarze, Head of Growth at Bewe, and Jade Sternberg, Open Innovation Manager at CSS, working for the Future of Health Grant. 

The first is a B2B approach through partnerships and pilots with insurers, clinics, and hospitals in Switzerland and abroad. The goal is to demonstrate that the solution enables healthcare stakeholders to deliver a comprehensive, data-driven care pathway for their patients. 

The second is a direct-to-consumer approach. By making Bewe available to a wider audience, the company aims to increase its database to improve the solution’s robustness. 

The two strategies ultimately serve the same purpose. 

As Barnabé explains:  “Both efforts tremendously help us improve our solution. The more data and insights we collect, the more precise and effective our solution will become.” 

For Bewe, pilots are fundamentally different from clinical studies. 

Years of neuroscience research and published randomized controlled trials have already shown that the underlying intervention works. A pilot asks a different set of questions: 

Can people adopt the solution easily? Can it be integrated seamlessly into an insurer’s or hospital’s workflows? Does it improve patient outcomes? Does it create value for all parties involved? 

“Our main goal is to prove the feasibility and usability of Bewe and its implementation within clinics or insurances, but also to demonstrate better outcomes and economic value for all institutions involved.” 

This distinction is also what makes pilots valuable for insurers. As Jade Sternberg explains, pilots provide CSS with a structured way to identify and validate innovative solutions for its insured members. Through the Future of Health Grant, CSS gains direct access to promising startups that can be tested in real-world settings. By embedding solutions within its Health Coaching Program, CSS can assess how digital tools complement human coaching, generate real-world evidence, and ultimately enrich its portfolio of services. 

The first major pilot with CSS started just over a year ago and was built around a clear roadmap and regular interactions with the CSS team. 

“We had weekly or bi-weekly meetings to get feedback from the coaches and their coachees, and to give updates from the team.” 

The pilot participants came through two main channels : the CSS health coaching program directly and the CSS magazine. 

The first group of users was identified by the health coaches themselves through their nutrition and physical activity coaching program, while the second group consisted of users who expressed interest after reading an article in the CSS magazine.  

Interestingly, both groups experienced positive outcomes, but those who interacted more closely with the coaching team appeared to derive even greater benefits. For both Bewe and CSS, this finding reinforces the value of hybrid models that combine digital solutions with human support. 

One of Bewe’s key indicators is the “Craving Delta”, an internally developed metric measuring changes in attraction toward targeted foods. The team also tracks user satisfaction (NPS), retention, and qualitative feedback collected throughout the pilot. 

For Barnabé, pilots are an integral part of product-market fit. 

“They also give us a lot of insights on how to approach any project or partner. What do they care about? What do they value? It allows us to focus more on those areas.” 

Regular feedback from users and partners has already helped the company improve its product, develop new features, and better understand what different stakeholders value. The product has evolved drastically throughout the year. A few examples include the continuous effort to streamline the patients onboarding process, the integration of new food categories, the implementation of reminder notifications when patients forget to play. 

At the same time, the team and CSS are developing more robust and quantitative KPIs that will allow them to better determine the health and economic impact of the solution.  

Beyond clinical outcomes, CSS is increasingly looking at assessing three complementary dimensions through pilots. As Jade explains: 

“In the future, we want to look more systematically at three important axes: cost-effectiveness, operational acceptance, and scalability across the Swiss healthcare system.” 

“The first pilot is usually the hardest to get off the ground.” 

The support of the Future of Health Grant and introductions to CSS helped create the initial opportunity. From there, it became a matter of making the right connections, presenting the solution and its outcomes, and agreeing on a structure and implementation plan. 

But the biggest challenge has been adoption. 

“Since we are a completely new and innovative solution, people in high-paced environments tend to forget about us even after the pilot is launched.” 

The challenge, according to Barnabé, is therefore to keep the relationship alive and maintain engagement throughout the pilot. 

“The biggest challenge isn’t launching the pilot. It’s keeping people involved and achieving the outcomes we set at the beginning.” 

This is perhaps one of the most important lessons for other startups: pilots are ultimately human projects. 

The same applies from the insurer’s perspective. Startups and insurers often operate at different speeds and under different constraints. One of the main challenges for CSS was therefore aligning objectives while ensuring compliance with strict regulatory and internal requirements. 

In this pilot, contractual aspects around data protection, data sharing, and access rights proved particularly time-consuming and required continuous dialogue between both parties. 

Many startups enter what is often called “pilot purgatory”: pilots multiply, but nothing moves toward deployment. 

For Barnabé, the answer again lies in relationships and structure. 

“If everyone is motivated by the pilot and the solution delivers on what it promised, you will find a way to move forward.” 

He also believes startups should progressively move toward more structured collaborations. 

After a few exploratory projects, pilots should define clear objectives, a timeline, success metrics, and what happens if those objectives are met. 

In practice, however, this is rarely straightforward. 

“With innovative solutions, it’s hard to pre-define KPIs and outcomes. Each pilot and interlocutor has its own specificities.” 

What matters most is having engaged teams on both sides that are willing to collaborate and find the most sensible path forward. 

The next chapter for Bewe is precisely that transition. The company is now working to transform the CSS pilot into a broader commercial deployment while also preparing additional pilots in other care settings, including with EHC. 

For CSS, structured and repeatable pilots are also essential. They generate comparable real-world evidence and accelerate internal decision-making around future collaborations. 

As Jade explains:  “Our collaboration with Bewe will not stop now that the pilot is over. We are exploring different ways to integrate Bewe’s solution into our portfolio. As of this summer, our insured members will be able to purchase Bewe’s application at a reduced price via our own health shop, enjoy365.“ 

This illustrates an important point for startups: A successful pilot does not have a single destination. It can open the door to commercial partnerships, wider deployment, integration into existing care pathways, and potentially contribute to future reimbursement discussions. 

Bewe’s journey illustrates that pilots are far more than experiments. 

They are opportunities to learn, refine a product, understand what different stakeholders value, and build the relationships necessary for future growth. 

Early pilots have a profound impact not only on the product itself, but also on how a startup positions itself and how its team operates. 

As Barnabé puts it: “Take the time to build the right projects with the right people.” 

The feeling was mutual. 

As Jade explains: “Working with Bewe was easy: the team took the pilot seriously, prioritized it and consistently involved the right resources and team members. This strong collaboration, combined with the convincing outcomes of the pilot, built real trust in the partnership and made us want to continue the relationship.” 

At the Future of Health Grant, we believe pilots should not end with a report. They should generate the evidence, partnerships, and trust needed to bring digital health innovations into routine care.