Doctor Koi receives a $0.5m seed fund

Doctor Koi, a Bangladeshi startup digitising medical prescriptions, has received $0.5 million in seed funding from Verge HealthTech Fund, an early-stage healthcare tech venture capital fund focusing on the Asia-Pacific, the Middle-East and North Africa regions, reports Mobihealth News.

The flagship product of the startup Digital Rx, a prescription writing software, is currently being used by over 900 doctors who are generating more than 350,000 digital prescriptions monthly, it reads. The platform also offers online consultation, appointment management, content management, marketing and other services.

Doctor Koi will use its seed funding to reach more customers in Bangladesh and develop new value-added services. It targets to bring its digital prescription tool to 10,000 more doctors in the country "in the coming years", the report said. The funding will also help bring in more doctors to its network for online consultation services. 

The Business Standard tried several times to contact the startup co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Sadman Soeb Adib over the phone to cross-check the news, but he could not be reached. 

The report said Doctor Koi, which translates to "Where is the Doctor" was initially intended to be a doctor booking platform. Its founders, Sadman Soeb Adib and Areek Zillur decided to focus on developing a digital prescription tool as one of the primary causes of treatment failures in Bangladesh is the immense amount of medical errors from handwritten prescriptions.

Doctor Koi is envisioned to be a "foundational layer for a low-cost, tech-enabled distributed primary care-focused health system". The healthcare system in Bangladesh has been described as analogue, fragmented, and short-staffed, perpetuating massive inefficiencies. "Even [something] as basic as a doctor's clinic" is not digitally equipped, according to Joseph Mocanu, a partner at Verge Healthtech Fund.

With a more enabling environment for digital health innovations today, the digital health market in Bangladesh is projected to be worth $371.5 million this year, according to Statista. It is expected to grow to $631.6 million in value by 2026, growing at a 14.19% compound annual growth rate.

"We believe Doctor Koi has tremendous potential with the type of products and services that are curated for the local market needs while offering the most advanced and scalable technologies. We are a very product-centric company that allowed us to understand the customers very deeply from the very initial days. Our customers are the biggest driver of our innovation and continuous improvements," Dr Koi CEO and co-founder Sadman Soeb Adib had been quoted in Mobihealth News.

"We believe the company can achieve much-scale and improve the healthcare ecosystem for 160 million population in Bangladesh and even beyond the globe while maximising the stakeholders' return," he added.