Air Doctor Raises $20M to Close Gap in Access to Doctors While Traveling

Traveling abroad comes with its own unique set of stresses, and one of the biggest things to do is if you find yourself unwell. Can you find a doctor who speaks your language, will accept your insurance, and allow you to avoid the expense and stress of visiting an unfamiliar hospital emergency room?

A startup called Spirit Doctor has built a platform to help people in this crisis, and has now raised a $20 million Series B after seeing strong engagement so far for their product.

That product is part directory, part algorithmically driven cloud-based service provider, and part accounting technology. Doctor of the Spirit where he hears a directory of doctors tested in different countries and profiles of what they include and what languages ​​they speak, which are given to users to browse and use as needed when face-to-face or remotely.

Patients themselves do not pay doctors or participate in getting claims paid by their insurance providers. After that, Air Doctor then compares the clients’ insurance policies with the services provided, and manages the doctors’ payments for reimbursement by the insurance companies themselves. Doctor Womoya takes a service fee and a commission for that process, but all the same, he says his efforts as a middleman lead to a 50% saving in overall inpatient requests, a 60% saving in medical care providers, and a saving in management and labor time. by 75%.

Air Doctor now has more than 80,000 customers, developed in part due to agreements with 18 major health insurance providers; and offers a directory of 20,000 doctors in 84 countries. (It started as a B2C provider but is now a B2B2C combination with insurance companies in the middle referring people to Air Doctor, and others using the service directly.)

And with revenue growing 2.5x a year, according to CEO and co-founder Jenny Cohen Derfler, and the number of international balloon travelers – the UN estimates the number at 790 million in the first seven months of this year – “The potential is huge, ” she said.

Investors in this round emphasized the opportunity the company is targeting: aMoon, an Israeli VC specializing in life sciences and health, is leading the way, with other new backers including insurance giant Tokio Marine Holdings and Samsung Ventures (SVIC). Previous backers Lightspeed Venture Partners, Vintage Investment Partners, and two other industry giants – Phoenix Insurance, and Munich Re Ventures – are also participating.

Investors also point to another aspect of the company’s technological strengths:

“Moon Doctor … uses advanced algorithms and app-based solutions to provide timely, high-quality healthcare to travelers around the world,” Todd Sone, General Partner in aMoon said in a statement.

Derfler’s interest in building Air Doctor comes in part from his and his partner’s (and co-founder’s) background. Derfler described himself to me in the interview as a “traveler”: he is from Uruguay; he traveled around South America; time spent abroad; and currently lives in Israel.

Her husband, Yam Derfler, came up with the idea for the company while on a trip.

In South America, he got sick and realized he didn’t know how to use the local health system to find a doctor. Instead he went to the hospital, which still seemed to have its own amazing curves.

Back home in Israel, when he and Jenny began to look more deeply into the problem, it became clear that Yam and the other consumers were not alone. Insurance companies also did not have a clear path to recommending in-network doctors when considering foreign countries outside of their home region.

And so began the process of building Air Doctor. That alone was fraught with challenges, Derfler recalls. The couple initially thought that in order to get closer to the problem and the solution, they would travel themselves to the first country they encountered, Greece, to find doctors to start building a network.

“We started visiting doctors in Greece with recommendations,” he said. “We found that when you call a doctor in Greece, the receptionist usually doesn’t speak English. And if you go to the address, the letters are not Latin letters, so we could not understand what floor the clinic is on. We wanted to understand the need for ourselves and what we needed to tell our users to do. ”

The two also used other methods to build their database, including contacting affiliates for recommendations, and word of mouth about doctors in the network. Before Covid-19, it brought together 10,000 doctors, and in the last two years another 10,000 have joined, he said. Now that it is working closely with insurance companies, it depends on them, too, to understand where people travel and what diseases are most common to focus on network growth.

The company has now raised about $50 million (including this Series A in 2020) and does not disclose valuation.