You can score a $1m seed round even in Sri Lanka. These founders show how.

ODoc founders Heshan Fernando, Sohan Dharmaraja, Dr. Janaka Wickremesinghe, and Inshard Naizer. Photo credit: oDoc.

The island nation south of India with its gorgeous beaches, rainforests, and ancient Buddhist ruins just saw one of its startups – medtech app oDoc – score US$1 million seed funding.

This is the largest seed investment round for any startup in Sri Lanka.

The country’s startup ecosystem is still very young with over 50 percent of its entrepreneurs using their personal savings to fund their companies. The seed funding round for oDoc comes at an opportune time as the island’s mass market is embracing tech through new ride-hailing options.

ODoc isn’t going after the mass market though – at least not yet. The app connects patients with doctors for video consultation. Say you wake up in the morning with a nasty rash and fever. Three taps on your smartphone and you can submit your pre-consultation notes, take a picture of your rash, and get a doctor to review those. A doctor will call you and send his prescription with the doctor’s seal and signature right to your phone. All done in 10 minutes.

Many startups around the world have been at it but oDoc’s four founders – with their diverse backgrounds – approached it more from a design perspective than as a tech problem to solve.

“The reason nobody has really cracked it is because they looked at it as a medical problem. They were building it as an Uber for doctors of sorts. But it is really about changing behavior. So it is more of a design problem. It needed a fresh set of eyes,” the founders tell Tech in Asia.

Stalking investors

The credentials of the founders plays a key role in instilling investor confidence, especially in the early stage of a startup when the product usage is yet to take off. That’s true for oDoc as well.

Before turning entrepreneur, oDoc CEO Heshan Fernando was the youngest assistant vice president of Sri Lanka’s largest listed company John Keells Holdings. He holds four majors – in mathematics, statistics, economics, and operations research – from the University of Warwick.

ODoc’s tech head Sohan Dharmaraja – with a PhD in computational applied mathematics from Stanford and masters from MIT – was an algorithmic trader with Goldman Sachs. He had built a braille keyboard app for the blind when was in the US.

Dharmaraja came back to Sri Lanka after his PhD. He tells Tech in Asia that he didn’t want to be just another expat critiquing his home country from afar instead of trying to push change himself.

Back home in Lanka, he started marketing tech startup SocialRoo with data analytics before moving to a consulting business. But he found it tough to convince companies in Sri Lanka what data analytics could do for their business.

Dharmaraja finally found his metier in oDoc, which has two more co-founders: Inshard Naizer, Fernando’s former colleague from John Keells, and Dr. Janaka Wickremesinghe, a general physician who holds three patents. Dr. Wickremesinghe is also the founder of Sri Lanka’s first online medical education platform CorpusMedici – which a third of all doctors in the island nation subscribe to, according to Fernando.

The investors who pumped in the US$1 million are Ajit Gunewardene, deputy chairman of John Keells; Phoenix Ventures, the investment arm of Sri Lankan apparel exporter Brandix; and Loits, the IT arm of conglomerate Lolc.

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