HD, the Bangkok-headquartered company behind HDmall, a healthcare and surgery marketplace in Thailand and Indonesia, has secured US$7.8 million in equity funding.
The funding round included participation from US-based Merck Sharp & Dohme (MSD), SBI Ven Capital, M Venture Partners, FEBE Ventures, and Partech Partners.
Also Read: These former aCommerce execs are building an ‘Amazon’ for healthcare in Southeast Asia
This marks the first investment by MSD IDEA Studio Asia Pacific, an initiative by the MSD Global Health Innovation Fund (MGHIF) and MSD Asia Pacific regional team, invest in a Southeast Asian healthtech firm.
HD will use the money to develop HDmall further and invest in its artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
Since its inception, HD has secured US$18 million in total funding.
HD was co-founded in 2019 by Sheji Ho, Aditya Jamaludin, Raya Chantaramungkorn (all former top executives at Thailand’s leading e-commerce enabler aCommerce), and Frankie Shum (formerly with Ardent Capital). HD connects patients to hospitals, clinics, operating rooms and surgeons while offering healthcare financing solutions to increase access to affordable care and surgeries.
HDcare works with healthcare providers – many already on the HDmall platform – to increase the utilisation of hospitals’ and clinics’ operating room capacities.
HDmall lists over 30,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs) from over 2,500 healthcare providers and several pharmaceutical partners. It has 400,000 paying customers across Thailand and Indonesia and has an annual gross transaction volume of US$100 million.
The healthtech firm targets 5,000 healthcare providers and 600,000 patients by 2025.
Also Read: ‘Airbnb for surgeries’ HDmall gets FEBE Ventures backing to deepen market presence in SEA
The firm has developed an AI chatbot, Jib AI, which uses large language models and has been trained on anonymised healthcare data, transaction data and chat commerce data. Jib AI manages approximately 60 per cent of customer interactions and provides 24/7 responses. The company plans to expand Jib AI’s capabilities to include order and refund processing, assisted checkouts, scheduling, electronic health record checks and medical information retrieval. It will also implement virtual care with expert physicians. Jib AI also helps healthcare professionals handle initial patient triaging and care navigation.
The startup plans to expand into Vietnam and potentially Myanmar, citing the similarity of their healthcare systems. The company sees a market opportunity because of the high percentage of out-of-pocket payments in the region and the increased self-empowerment of users who are searching for health information online.
The post HD lands US$7.8M to grow HDmall, expand AI chatbot, enter Vietnam appeared first on e27.