Indonesian health information portal Alodokter gets seed funding

Indonesian health information portal Alodokter today announced that it has received seed funding from a group of global investors. The round was led by Fenox Venture Capital, with participation from 500 Startups, Lim Der Shing, and Golden Gate Ventures. The amount was undisclosed. Nathanael Faibis, founder and CEO of Alodokter, says the funds will be used to expand the company’s operations and bring more doctors on board.

According to Faibis, the portal brings easy-to-understand and accurate health information to Indonesian web users, with the goal to help people take more informed health decisions. Faibis said it is the company’s objective to lead the Indonesian health information market by the end of this year.

Before founding Alodokter, Faibis worked in market research and consulting for the pharmaceutical industry in emerging countries including Indonesia. But he also has solid tech company experience, having participated in the launch of Lazada in Southeast Asia in 2012 as regional head of user experience and production.

“Navigating between the online and healthcare world, I saw a need for better sources of health information online especially in Indonesia,” he explained. “Demand for health information was high but there was no reference source of health information available in Bahasa Indonesia contrary to most other big countries in the world.”

Alodokter was first launched in July 2014. By January 2015, it had 375,000 monthly unique visitors. Over the past 30 days, growth has accelerated and Alodokter clocked more than 1.4 million monthly unique visitors in that period, according to Faibis.

Alodokter’s traffic data up to March 2015 from similarweb

Alodokter will monetize primarily through advertising. “Ads represent over 80 percent of revenues of similar websites in other countries. Developing a premium advertising space for health announcers will be our priority in terms of monetization,” says Faibis.

Faibis thinks that on the long run, a large user base for health information may also support the launch of other health oriented products on the platform.

He predicts a growing interest for health-related information in Indonesia. “A Google executive recently stated that five percent of Google searches in the world are health-related. Demand for health information in Indonesia is also important and has been growing at an exponential rate in the last few years. With the rapid rise of Internet usage and online marketing spending, we firmly believe this will become an important market in the coming years.”

Alodokter currently has 10 doctors on board answering users’ questions. According to Faibis, the doctors are carefully selected based on their medical knowledge and the quality of their answers to the patients. All editorial content is based on peer-reviewed science and edited by doctors.

Competitors to Alodokter in Indonesia include MeetDoctor, KlikDokter, 1Health, and the also recently funded Dokter.id, but Faibis believes that consistent, high quality delivery will win the race. “We aim at providing the best health content available online in Bahasa Indonesia and a good user interface, especially on mobile. We believe that users end up choosing the best source of information.”