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We are excited to have led Doctor Anywhere’s USD27m Series B round, supporting its vision to improve healthcare outcomes across Southeast Asia (SEA). Doctor Anywhere is building an integrated, care delivery platform that encompasses telehealth, prescriptions and end-to-end care management in partnership with leading insurers and care facilities.
We are privileged to have as our co-leads EDBI (a global Asian-based investor) and IHH Healthcare (a leading international healthcare provider), with participation from Pavilion Capital and existing shareholder Kamet Capital.
As venture investors, we understand the significant roles that luck and timing can play, both in what we do and what our portfolio companies set out to achieve. As we write this, the World is battling the Covid-19 pandemic, which has already caused unprecedented health and economic impacts globally. Considering this, the need for a platform like Doctor Anywhere is even more urgent and acute.
But the timing of our investment is coincidence. The reality is that this investment is the culmination of many years spent scouring the health landscape regionally for the right opportunity. Our relationship with Wai Mun Lim (Doctor Anywhere’s founder and CEO) and this investment process began well before the World became gripped with a global pandemic.
A personal mission
We met Wai Mun last year as part of our research into the healthcare space in SEA. We were immediately impressed with his drive, intelligence and the clarity with which he thought about the business. But what impressed us most was how personal the mission of Doctor Anywhere was to him.
Before starting the company, Wai Mun worked at Temasek. While there, he undertook community work and saw how difficult it was for certain groups to access quality health care, even in a place like Singapore. As he contemplated that problem across the region, he realised that the challenges that existed for people in neighbouring countries were even greater.
He decided to do something about it. While still working at Temasek he built “version 1” of the Doctor Anywhere app, which let people in aged care facilities tele-consult with GPs. When he saw how much this helped both the patients and the doctors, he took a one-year leave of absence to work full-time on the project. By the end of that year, the enormity of the challenge and his desire to solve it was even more apparent, and he quit Temasek to focus on the company.
Over the past year, Wai Mun has overseen significant growth in the team, an expansion of the company’s footprint beyond Singapore to other SEA countries, and an evolution of the business model from telehealth to an integrated platform that brings together the patient, the doctor, the payor and physical care facilities.
A growing need
Demand for healthcare services across SEA is continuing to grow, driven by rising populations, a growing middle class and increasing life expectancy.
This growth in demand is exacerbating several challenges: health spend is outstripping economic growth, necessitating more efficient solutions for care delivery; local infrastructure can’t grow capacity fast enough to deal with the growth in demand; and patients have to deal with excessive wait times, lengthy insurance claims processes, rising costs of care and potential fraud in the pharmaceutical supply chains.
In addition, chronic traffic congestion and a large rural population create a barrier to timely access to care for a high proportion of the population.
The company believes that technology holds the answer. The opportunity lies in tapping into the proliferation of high-bandwidth mobile networks, the high penetration of mobile phones across urban and rural populations and a “mobile-native” culture to deliver care differently.
Enter Doctor Anywhere
Doctor Anywhere has developed a telehealth-centric platform that will smooth friction in every aspect of how care is accessed and delivered in SEA. At scale, it will encompass everything from online consultations to prescription management and payment financing.
This will fundamentally shift how care is delivered and provide value for participants across value chain – patients, doctors, payors and care facilities:
- Patients will benefit from efficient, affordable access to quality care, with ease of payment and reimbursement
- Doctors will be able to operate more efficiently and see more patients
- Payors (insurers, self-insured corporates, governments) will reduce costs of care and claims processing and drive higher levels of insurance that protect more people, and
- Physical care facilities like clinics and hospitals will be able to use the platform to manage patient experience and workflows better.
We believe that the potential for exceptional people to improve health outcomes using technology is enormous, and Doctor Anywhere marks our fourth investment in the sector after UHG, Aidoc and HealthMatch.
We are excited to be on this journey to support Wai Mun and his team as they strive to improve health outcomes across the region.
#empowertheexceptional
