Virgílio Bento

EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year™ 2026 finalist, Portugal
Founder and CEO, Sword Health

Virgílio Bento is using AI to close the gap between patient needs and healthcare capacity.

Virgílio V Bento has spent his life thinking about a fundamental imbalance: people need far more care than traditional healthcare systems can provide. Growing up, he saw the strain on clinicians and recognized that the future of healthcare depended on delivering superior patient experience, value and outcomes through thoughtfully designed technology. He understood that only by augmenting human clinicians with artificial intelligence (AI) could care be delivered at the scale society needs.

While earning his PhD in Electrical Engineering, Virgílio began laying the scientific foundations for this shift. He identified AI’s transformative potential to reshape care delivery, moving from human centered models to AI augmented systems capable of extending clinicians’ reach while maintaining clinical quality. That vision became Sword Health, the company he founded to bring AI Healers into everyday life and help people recover quickly from conditions that limit their ability to live fully.

Today, Sword Health has delivered more than 10 million AI sessions to over 700,000 patients across three continents, supporting physical pain, women’s health and mental health while helping more than 1,000 enterprise clients avoid over US$1 billion in healthcare costs. Backed by 44 patents, 42 clinical studies and over US$500 million from leading investors, Virgílio continues to push toward a future where worldclass care is as accessible as running water.