Founded in the second half of last year by a quintet that includes an established neurosurgeon who put his career on hold to lend the startup his medical experience, doctorly’s primary product will be a SaaS (software as a service) solution designed to save doctors time and increase their efficiency. The doctorly software aims to address the inefficient administrative processes and outdated – sometimes analog – processes that remain a feature of the medical landscape in most countries.
“We’re disrupting the way doctors run their day because right now they’re not supported very well,” says lively Londoner Samir El-Alami, CEO & Co-Founder of doctorly. “They’ve got old tools and aren’t given the right ones to do their job. Some doctors are still stuck with Windows 95 and saving patient data on discs! And yet these are the people we rely upon to help us live well and heal us. So we’re going to give them something that allows them to focus more on what they actually do, which is seeing patients.”
“It’s an area super ripe for disruption,” continues Samir. “Our co-founder Dr Archil Eristavi really has put his career as a neurosurgeon on pause after 17 years because he was so distressed with what he and other doctors had to go through in order to do their jobs. But though Archil is stopping to build doctorly, he has every intention of going back, because being a neurosurgeon is what he does. And when we tell doctors that story, they really buy in. They see that we have their best interests at heart. The doctor community has really embraced us so far and we’re excited about going live with our product by Q4 this year.”
El-Alami believes that an approach in which the first step is to serve doctors deserves more attention from health innovators. His startup sees improving the efficiency of medical practices and doctor workflows as the best way to improve the lot of patients frustrated by the service they get, poor or outdated communication, and issues with medical data management and access.
Doctorly also plans to spread the benefits of this system to patients of the doctors who’ll work with their system. They’ll do that via their health app, which will act as a one-stop shop for data management, appointments, test results and personalised analytics. It will be able to centralize everything for a patient visiting multiple practitioners.
“We feel that the correct way to really make meaningful change in health is first to help the doctor, then help their patients, and repeat. It’s incredibly scalable: once you’ve built it then it’s just about getting it in front of doctors. And it’s universal: every country needs this, except maybe some of the Nordics or places like Estonia, which are quite small countries and have already rolled out some pretty decent national health standards.”
Doctorly is the fifth health tech startup to join the Pioneers Ventures portfolio of pre-seed startups, which now numbers almost 30 after this deal was closed last week. The others are ivary, Blub Blub, Medicus and OurPath.
“We strongly believe that the health industry is still awaiting its digital revolution,” said Philipp Stangl of Pioneers Ventures. “Doctorly is another building block in that revolution – and it’s a super-relevant one, because it digitizes one of the key parts of the health system: the doctor-patient relationship. We’re pleased to be adding it to our already-strong digital health portfolio, which already consists of four excellent startups.
“Another of our portfolio companies, Habitalix, is using a similar technology stack to that of doctorly, and we’ve seen that this approach can be very efficient.”
Pioneers Ventures was joined as an investor in the pre-seed round by Target Global and Seedcamp.
“We’re definitely looking forward to working with Pioneers Ventures,” added El-Alami. “It’s a really strong pre-seed round with three great VCs. It’s not common for a pre-seed startup to be backed by three really big VCs, and this is really strong backing.
“Actually I’m not sure we came across super well in our first pitch to the guys at Pioneers Ventures! Luckily they gave us a second meeting though, and it went a lot better. I feel our investors believe our founder team has the ability to execute. When you have a good passion for what you’re doing, I do feel like it makes a little bit of a difference to investors.
“We did have choices on who we took money from, but the feedback I got from people who have Pioneers Ventures as investors is that their network is really strong. You get good introductions, the guys you deal with are smart, and the events Pioneers arranges really add value too. I heard about Health.Pioneers last year, which sounded really cool – I hope there’s another one soon. I’d like to be at Pioneers’18 too!”
