Most health apps begin with a doctor. Alodokter, in the way it tells its own story, began with a question: where does an ordinary Indonesian go to ask whether a symptom is serious?
Nathanael Faibis and Suci Arumsari founded the company in 2014, with Faibis as chief executive and Arumsari as director.
The pandemic put telemedicine into the national conversation, and also invited well-funded rivals such as Halodoc and Good Doctor.
The starting problem was access. Indonesia is a country of islands, and clinics are clustered in big cities. A person with a worrying rash or a feverish child might wait hours at a clinic, or go without advice. Alodokter set out to put health information and doctors on a phone: articles written by medical staff, a place to ask questions, and later the ability to book appointments and consult a physician online.
The early money was modest. A seed round in 2015 came from Fenox Venture Capital. In 2017 SoftBank Ventures Korea led a US$9m Series B with Golden Gate Ventures and Fenghe, a sign that regional investors thought Indonesian healthcare was ready for software.
The larger step came in 2019, when a US$33m Series C led by insurer Sequis Life brought in Philips, Heritas Capital, Hera Capital and Dayli Partners. Having an insurer and a medical-device giant at the table said something about where the company wanted to go: toward becoming a platform connecting patients, doctors, hospitals and payers rather than a content site. In June 2021 MDI Ventures, the corporate arm of Telkom Indonesia, and Samsung Ventures added fresh capital. One aggregator puts total funding at about US$53m.
The pandemic put telemedicine into the national conversation, and also invited well-funded rivals such as Halodoc and Good Doctor. Alodokter had to defend a position it had built through content over years.
There is a founder lesson here that is easy to miss. Faibis and Arumsari did not start with the glamorous part of healthcare, the hospital or the lab. They started with the unglamorous question millions of people were already typing into a search bar, and built outward from the habit that already existed.