Daktar Bondhu, a Dhaka-based health-tech startup that offers services to patients, especially those who suffer from Diabetes, Hypertension, and other chronic illnesses, announced that it has raised a pre-seed investment from SBK Tech Ventures, a technology fund focusing on early-stage, tech-platform companies in emerging markets. The company did not disclose detail of the funding.
Daktar Bondhu currently offers video consultations with 60+ specialist doctors across 20+ departments which include mental health, dermatology, cardiology, etc. through its mobile app. It also delivers authentic medicine and healthcare products to the patients’ doorstep within 24 hours inside Dhaka city at an affordable price.
Daktar Bondhu was one of the winners of R-ventures 2.0 program sponsored by Robi Axiata Ltd, the 2nd largest telco in Bangladesh. Daktar Bondhu is also a portfolio startup of the IDEA project by the ICT division of the Govt of Bangladesh.
The commercial launch of Daktar Bondhu in October 2020 was received well, with over 3,000 doctor consultations and medicine orders in the past 8 months, and increasing every month. 50% of paying customers are recurring monthly as the app is able to save them up to 15% of their healthcare expenditures each month as well as save time on visits to specialist doctors.
The founding team of Daktar Bondhu includes Arefin Zaman, Dr. Golam Moktadir Prince, Nazmul Hossain, and Mamun-Or-Rashid, who bring diverse skill-sets in Machine Learning, Healthcare, Technology, and Operations.
Arefin Zaman, the CEO & Co-Founder, is a RUET graduate working in Machine Learning & Natural Language Processing for 5 years now. He worked as a senior machine learning engineer at Socian Ltd and has 4 peer-reviewed research papers on artificial intelligence. Arefin said: “Bangladesh has 30 million chronic patients who spend on average $400 per year on healthcare. Most of these patients can not improve their long-term health outcomes because they lack a basic understanding of their diseases. We are building a personalized AI health assistant for these people that will help them in every step of their healthcare journey. We are working on a medical chatbot that will be able to analyze a patient’s symptoms and try to suggest probable diagnosis and financially viable treatment plans automatically. It will also refer them to a doctor or hospital if it’s not completely sure about the symptoms or the symptoms seem dangerous or urgent. With the data collected in the 1st phase of our operations, we are trying to understand the user behavior and build our product accordingly. With this funding, we will try to acquire more users for our current offering as well as work towards launching the bot into our app later this year.”
Dr. Golam Moktadir, Co-founder & Chief Healthcare Officer, said that they plan to use the investment to build some new features to augment its remote consultation technology platform and improve the supply chain of medicine and build new partnerships with hospitals and doctors.
Sonia Bashir Kabir, Founder & Managing Director at SBK Tech Ventures stated: “Creating access to healthcare through technology is one of the cornerstones of our investment strategy — we believe services like Daktar Bondhu can bring this to a mass-market audience. We wish them great success.”
