Some funding round news coming out of California: the Finnish team behind BetterDoctor announces they’ve raised a €1.9 million ($2.6 million) round led by SoftTechVC and Burrill & Co. Perhaps more importantly, they also announce they’ve helped four million Americans find doctors in their first year of operation, suggesting good growth on their web and mobile platform that helps Americans find doctors in their city.
I was surprised myself with the number of people that are using the web to look for doctors,” says BetterDoctor CEO Ari Tulla. “But if you think about it, it’s understandable.” Today when people are looking for doctors they might type in the specialty they’re looking for, and then their city. BetterDoctor has positioned their platform for this type of search and has been seeing a lot of volume coming through Google. “People go there and they don’t see advertising – they get exactly what they want,” says Tulla, which helps drive further Google traction.
On the directory side, BetterDoctor has grown rapidly since we last covered them. They started with five specialties and a focus on the Bay area, and now are completely covering the U.S. with 60 different specialties ranging from your general practitioner to sleep specialists.
Now Tulla says it’s time for them to make the platform more powerful by encouraging doctors to submit and curate profiles of themselves, providing better and deeper engagement. But they’re also busy on other fronts. In total, they’re building up the website, the mobile website, the iPhone app, the doctor-focused website, and are maintaining a fairly complicated data asset.
Right now Obamacare is the talk of the town in the U.S., so we threw a question Tulla’s way about how changes in Amerca’s healthcare system is going to impact his startup. In Tulla’s eyes it’s going to be a net positive because if anything, more people are going to be looking for healthcare providers, and will do so online.
On the topic of fundraising, Tulla says it’s always time consuming and hard, but points out that they’ve noticed they’re in a strange space between consumer web and medical, making them build their round out of 9 different funds who are focused on one sector or other.
BetterDoctor started the year with only six people and now claims a 21 person team. Jeff Clavier from SoftTechVC and Dirk Lammerts from Burrill & Co joined the board with the funding round.
