Startups in Southeast Asia, particularly those within the healthcare and delivery industries, have managed to boost thousands and thousands of dollars to speed up their expansion, showing investor appetite to search out promising job opportunities within the region despite the economic turmoil resulting from the coronavirus pandemic.
Healthcare startups that seem like gaining traction in the course of the pandemic include Singapore-based telehealth app Doctor Anywhere, which raised $27 million in a Series B funding round in late March from a bunch of investors including a Malaysian hospital operator IHH Healthcare.
The Doctor Anywhere app enables a couple of million users to seek the advice of with an area doctor via video call – at a price of 20 Singapore dollars ($14) per consultation in Singapore – and have their medications delivered to the user’s location inside hours. It also has a web-based marketplace for health products. There are roughly 1,300 GPs and healthcare specialists registered on the platform in Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
As the coronavirus began to spread, the telehealth platform gained increasing attention. It has been implemented at customs checkpoints on the Singapore Ferry Terminal to help with on-site health screening of passengers with COVID-19 symptoms via teleconsultation. It also provides medical services to people under home quarantine within the city-state.
Lim said Doctor Anywhere’s business has seen “two- to three-fold growth” for the reason that start of the Covid-19 crisis. “The Covid-19 situation, while unfortunate, has highlighted the need for telehealth as a useful tool and additional resource to address workforce challenges, care for at-risk groups, and deliver healthcare more effectively.”
The company will use $27 million to strengthen its existing operations in Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam and to facilitate expansion into recent markets comparable to Malaysia and the Philippines this 12 months, he said.
In the primary three months of 2020, Vietnamese drugstore chain Pharmacity also raised $31.8 million, and Malaysian food delivery startup Dahmakan raised $18 million, in accordance with Crunchbase.
Over the past two to 3 years, telehealth applications have been seen as a promising sector in Southeast Asia because of a shortage of doctors and a growing middle-class population that’s more health conscious.
