Travelling abroad comes with its unique set of stresses, and one of the biggest is what to do if you find yourself unwell. Can you find a doctor who speaks your language, will accept your insurance, and let you avoid the costs and stress of visiting an unfamiliar hospital emergency room?
A startup called Air Doctor has built a platform to help people in this very predicament, and it has now raised a Series B of $20 million after seeing strong engagement to date for its product.
That product is part directory, part algorithmically-driven location based service provider, and part accounting tech. Air Doctor at its hear is a directory of vetted doctors in different countries along with profiles of what they cover and what languages they speak, which are in turn provided to users to browse and use as needed for either in-person or remote consultations.
Patients themselves do not pay the doctors or get involved in getting claims covered by their respective insurance providers. Behind the scenes, Air Doctor then matches up customers’ insurance policies with the services that are rendered, and manages the payments to doctors to get reimbursed by those insurance companies themselves. Air Doctor takes a service fee and commission in that process, but all the same, it claims that its efforts as middle man result in 50% savings on outpatient claims overall, 60% savings for medical assistance providers, and savings in handling and processing time of 75%.
Air Doctor now has more than 80,000 customers, boosted in part by way of contracts with some 18 major health insurance providers; and it provides a directory of 20,000 doctors across 84 countries. (It started as a B2C provider but is now a combination of B2B2C with insurance companies in the middle referring individuals to Air Doctor, along with others using the service directly.)
And with its revenues growing at 2.5x annually, according to CEO and co-founder Jenny Cohen Derfler, and the number of people travelling internationally ballooning — the UN estimates the figure at 790 million in the first seven months of this year — “The potential is much larger,” she said. (And yes there are other startups targeting travellers and their health needs: Feather is building an insurance platform for expats.)
The investors in this round underscore the opportunity that the company is targeting: aMoon, an Israeli VC that focuses specifically on health and life sciences, is leading the round, with other new backers including insurance giant Tokio Marine Holdings and Samsung Ventures (SVIC). Previous backers Lightspeed Venture Partners, Vintage Investment Partners, and two more industry biggies — Phoenix Insurance, and Munich Re Ventures — are also participating.
The investors also spell out another aspect of the tech potential that the company has been building out:
“Air Doctor is … leveraging advanced algorithms and app-based solutions to provide timely, quality medical care for travelers worldwide,” Todd Sone, General Partner in aMoon in a statement.
Derfler’s interest in building Air Doctor comes in part from her and her partner (and co-founder’s) own background. Derfler described herself to me in an interview as a “nomad”: she originally hails from Uruguay; travelled around South America; spent time in other countries; and currently lives in Israel.
Her husband, Yam Derfler, originally came up with the idea for the company when travelling.
In South America, he fell ill and realized he had no idea how to navigate the local health system to find a doctor. He went to a hospital instead, which proved to have its own dramatic turns.
Back at home in Israel, when he and Jenny started to look deeper at the problem, it was clear that Yam and other consumers were not alone. Insurance companies also didn’t have a clear route to recommending doctors in a network when considering foreign countries outside their home territory.
And so began the process of building Air Doctor. That in itself was also filled with challenges, Derfler recalled. The couple initially thought that to be very close to the problem and solution, they would travel themselves to the first country they tackled, Greece, to find doctors to start building a network.
“We started to go to visit doctors in Greece through recommendations,” she said. “We learned that when you call a doctor in Greece, the receptionist usually doesn’t know English. And when you go to the address, the letters are not Latin letters, so we couldn’t understand in which floor a clinic was located on. We wanted to understand the need ourselves and what we needed to tell our users to do.”
The pair also used other methods to build up its database, including contacting embassies for recommendations, and then word of mouth through existing doctors on the network. Before Covid-19, it amassed 10,000 doctors, and in the last two years another 10,000 have joined, she said. Now that it’s working more closely with insurance companies, it leans on them, too, to understand where people travel and what are the most common ailments to focus its network growth.
The company has now raised around $50 million (including this Series A in 2020) and it is not disclosing valuation.
