Large tech companies and pharmaceutical companies are accelerating the implementation of artificial intelligence in the healthcare industry. Last month, AWS and General Catalyst announced a partnership to speed up the development and deployment of healthcare AI tools. GE Healthcare collaborated with AWS to build a generator AI for medical use in 2024.
Currently, Thailand-based healthcare startup HD is building market Hdmall to digitalize the fragmented healthcare industry in Southeast Asia. The startup will help users find healthcare providers, such as hospitals and clinics. It also helps people find specific surgeries and health checks, tallying services to reduce costs, and offering users installment options.
The startup has secured $7.8 million in equity funds to bolster the market and invest more in AI technology. Recent funding marks the first investment of US pharmaceutical company Merck Sharp & Dohme (MSD) in a health technology startup in the Asia-Pacific region. (MSD is a brand that Merck uses to operate outside the US and Canada, and launched an accelerator called Idea Studios last June.) Other participants in HD funding include SBI Ven Capital, M Venture Partners, Febe Ventures and Parttech Partners also participated. Latest fundraising.
“MSD, which produces HPV vaccines, already sells many HPV vaccines online that were managed in the hospitals and clinics where we work, so we contacted (US).” In an exclusive interview. “And if you look at the numbers, we're going to (providing) the largest number of vaccines online in the market.”
The five-year-old startup marketplace has over 30,000 equity maintenance units (SKUs) from over 2,500 hospitals and clinics, a small number of pharmaceutical partners in Thailand and Indonesia and 400,000 paying customers, and an annual gross trading It generates $100 million in volume. It's attracting attention. It aims to reach 5,000 healthcare providers and 600,000 patients in 2025.
The latest funding, which brings HD total funding to $18 million, comes less than a year after raising $5.6 million.
In early 2024, HD began building AI chatbot JIB AI, which is trained on anonymized healthcare product data, transaction data and chat commerce datasets using advanced leading language models . After implementing generated AI technology in the market, nearly 60% of customer interactions are managed by AI agents, providing customers with a “high-quality instant 24/7 response.”
JIB AI helps healthcare professionals, such as nurses, doctors, and surgeons, focus on delivering quality patient care by handling most initial triaging and care navigation tasks.
For the next 12 months, the company will add order and refund processing, checkout assistance, scheduling, electronic health record checks, and medical information search with JIB AI Health Assistant, and add AI-powered asynchronous virtual care This aims to improve AI agent functionality. With a specialist doctor.
The startup also says it plans to expand its network of external partners over the next two years, focusing on insurance, pharmaceutical companies, employers and educational institutions.
“While US healthcare companies like Transcarent and Accolade have launched B2B Care Navigation directly, there is a unique opportunity to adopt the “B2C2B strategy” defined by Andreessen Horowitz, Ho told TechCrunch. “This approach leverages the success of existing B2C to move to B2B, effectively pursuing enterprise monetization from the start.”
Healthcare in Southeast Asia
Most venture-backed healthcare startups in Southeast Asia, including doctors, Harodok and Arodoc in Indonesia, focus primarily on telehealth and virtual health services. However, Ho says this approach is not sustainable in Southeast Asia. “Telehealth post-pandemic as a business model at sea has faced major challenges and is rapidly losing favours both by consumers and investors.”
The company currently positions itself as a combination of the US's outpatient healthcare platforms, such as Amazon One Medical, JD Health and Alibaba Health, as well as the Indian inpatient healthcare platform Pristyn Care.
The healthcare industry is completely different in emerging Southeast Asian markets such as Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam. Without a family physician system like in Western countries, patients often go directly to hospitals or clinics. This makes it difficult for patients to find the right healthcare services, know where to go, and understand how to handle costs, Ho told TechCrunch.
With 40% of medical expenses paid by individuals and the low scope of private health insurance, people are price sensitive and feel more pressure when making decisions. This led to increased demand for a platform that provides clarity, transparency and ease of comparison among the various providers, the HO continued.
The HD platform works like “Amazon of Healthcare.” Instead of listing individual GPSs or providing scheduling for physician appointments, healthcare providers will be able to sell product services. “Our products range from health checkups, cancer screening, IVF procedures to root canal treatment, HPV vaccination, surgical procedures like thyroid and hemo extension. This approach is a way for most people in the area to do so. , which coincides with how you start your healthcare journey by searching for specific services rather than individual physicians,” Ho said.
HD is serving Thailand and Indonesia and will enter Vietnam and Myanmar for a similar health care system.
“Their healthcare model is very similar in some respects to mainland China. So it's a high cash payment, about 40%. There's no family physician system, so people can be hospitals and clinics. Go directly to the government, and then there will be government social security compensation,” Ho told TechCrunch. “But these budgets are getting smaller and smaller, which means that more pressure to cover healthcare is shifting towards the private sector, whether cash or private insurance. That means, that's why insurance in the future offers us a huge opportunity.”
Furthermore, there is a tendency to rise towards self-development in terms of user behavior in these markets. They are getting used to using tools like Google Search and ChatGpt to search for healthcare-related subjects. According to Ho, this fits well with what HD offers, allowing individuals to choose their healthcare.
