Your. MD, an AI-driven health information service delivered via a bot, has raised $10 million in new funding.
Your. MD, an AI-driven health information service delivered via a bot, has raised $10 million in new funding. The round was led by Orkla Ventures, the venture arm of Orkla, a leading supplier of branded consumer goods to the health, pharmacy, and grocery sectors in the Nordics, Baltics and parts of Central Europe. Existing investor Smedvig Capital and other unnamed existing shareholders also participated.
Billed as a AI-based “pre-primary care service, ” Your. MD is available for web, iOS, Android, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Slack and Telegram. It is part chatbot, helping users figure out what might be wrong with them via a conversational interface that drills down into your symptoms, and part next-generation search engine to surface detailed and verified information on various medical conditions.
Alongside this, the London-headquartered startup has developed what it calls the “OneStop Health platform, ” a marketplace of trusted health service providers and products, some of which it has a commercial partnership. So, for example, if Your. MD helps you determine that you need to speak to a doctor, OneStop would connect you to video telemedicine service Push Doctor. Or if a massage could be the correct remedy, Your. MD would send you Urban Massage ‘s way.
There are currently 35 international and local digital health businesses on the platform, and the company says it plans to grow this to over 100 by the end of the year. OneStop is also key to how Your. MD plans to generate revenue, for what it otherwise a free information service.
In a call with Your. MD founder and CEO Matteo Berlucchi, I likened the combination of Your. MD’s next-generation search engine combined with the OneStop Health platform to the way Google’s own search engine captures and then monetises intent. He agreed that the comparison is valid, but with one key difference.
When people search for information on a product or service they typically already know what it is they are looking for and what action or intent will follow. With health, there is an extra stage needed before intent can be captured, which is helping you figure out what it is you need first. “When you do a health-related search you don’ t want lots of results, you just want the correct one, ” notes Berlucchi.
To date, Your. MD has garnered 2.1 million downloads and says it has nearly a million active users per month. Interestingly, 67 per cent of users are male and 33 per cent female. Who said men don’ t want to talk about their health? Albeit to an AI-based chatbot.
