Thailand’s HD enters AI with healthcare chatbot after $5.6m raise

Photo credit: HD

HD, a Thailand-based healthtech firm touted as the “Airbnb for surgeries,” appears to have hit a growth curve last year. In January, it secured US$6 million in funding and, a few months later, it raised another round of fresh capital to enter Vietnam.

Now the 2019-founded startup is looking to develop an AI-powered conversational chatbot focused on the healthcare space.

To that end, the company has banked US$5.6 million in a series A funding round led by SBI Ven Capital, a subsidiary of Japanese financial services major SBI Group, through its joint fund with Kyobo Securities from South Korea and NTU Singapore’s NTUitive.

Other investors include M Venture Partners, Febe Ventures, Partech Partners, Ratio Ventures, Orvel Ventures, and TA Ventures.

The chatbot would handle regular customer questions, freeing up human staff for complex issues while helping ensure that customer service is available around the clock.

“In emerging Southeast Asian markets, the real opportunity for healthcare AI lies not in building yet another general practitioner chatbot, but in enhancing patient outcomes by streamlining operational and administrative tasks for providers and payers,” said co-founder Sheji Ho – previously a co-founder and CMO at ecommerce enabler aCommerce – in a statement.

HD also said it plans to train this chatbot with its wealth of anonymized data from healthcare products, transactions, and chat commerce.

According to TechCrunch, HD plans to launch the service within three months for its HDmall marketplace, and eventually offer the chatbot to third parties – such as hospitals and clinics – by year-end.

Ho said in the TechCrunch interview that HD was already on pace to hit profitability after the pandemic, so it didn’t see the need to raise funding at first. But he said that “if we raise now then everything else will be cheaper,” highlighting lower rates in customer and talent acquisition following the recent trend of layoffs and other companies’ decreases in advertising budgets.

The advent of more accessible AI capabilities, brought on by the success of companies like OpenAI, has already changed the trajectory of healthtech. Morgan Stanley predicted that companies will set aside 11% of their healthcare budgets on average in AI tech this year – be it for improvements in diagnostics, drug discovery, and physician-patient engagement.

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