This Indonesian start-up has become the Gates Foundation’s first health care tech investment

Jonathan Sudharta was a brawl-prone, unremarkable student who played in a rock band. Friends of his father, a self-made tycoon, feared he would one day take over the family medical business and ruin it.

Instead, in 2016, at the age of 34, Sudharta co-founded a start-up that attracted the interest of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and today becomes the organisation’s first ever equity investment in an online health care platform.

His creation, Halodoc, is trying to address one of the biggest problems in medicine: In a world with too few doctors and hundreds of millions of people without proper access to clinics, how can people get the diagnosis and drugs they need quickly and cheaply?

“Someone is going to solve patient-centric, 21st century, primary health care and we think that Halodoc has a huge potential to do that,” said David Rossow, London-based founding partner of the Gates Foundation’s Strategic Investment Fund.

Microsoft Corp’s co-founder has invested heavily to fight specific diseases, including a pledge of US$1 billion to end malaria. Yet the challenge for much of the developing world is how to get health care day to day, not just for a single illness.

About 40 million people use Halodoc’s app or website to connect with more than 22,000 licensed doctors in Indonesia for an online consultation. Sudharta said in an interview he is aiming to expand that by 2020 to 100 million people – more than one in three Indonesians. Once they have a diagnosis, patients can buy medicine through the app from one of more than 1,000 pharmacies and get it speedily delivered by motorcycle or scooter.

Halodoc, valued at about US$350 million according to people familiar with its accounts, also offers home blood and urine tests by a visiting medical attendant, with the result sent via the app. Patients can use the website if needed to book face-to-face appointments with a doctor at a hospital.