• Post by Jhon Abraham
• Feb 14, 2025

Big Tech and pharmaceutical companies are accelerating the implementation of artificial intelligence in the healthcare industry. Just last month, AWS and General Catalyst announced their partnership to speed up the development and deployment of healthcare AI tools. GE HealthCare teamed up with AWS to build generative AI for medical use in 2024.  

Now, Thailand-based healthcare startup HD has built a marketplace, HDmall, to digitize the fragmented medical industry in Southeast Asia. The startup helps users find healthcare providers like hospitals and clinics. It also assists people in finding specific surgeries and health checkups, aggregates services to lower costs and provides users with installment payment options.

The startup has secured $7.8 million in equity funding to enhance its marketplace and invest further in its AI technology. The recent funding marks the first investment of U.S. pharma giant Merck Sharp & Dohme (MSD) in a health tech startup in Asia Pacific. (MSD is the brand that Merck uses to operate outside the U.S. and Canada, and it launched an accelerator called IDEA Studios last June.) Other participants in HD’s funding included SBI Ven Capital, M Venture Partners, FEBE Ventures, and Partech Partners also participated in the latest financing.

“MSD, which produces the HPV vaccines, reached out to [us] because we were already selling a lot of HPV vaccines online that were being administered at the hospitals and clinics we work with,” co-founder and CEO of HD Sheji Ho said in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch. “And if you look at the numbers, we [offer] the largest number for vaccines online in the markets.”

The 5-year-old startup’s marketplace has over 30,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs) from more than 2,500 hospitals and clinics and a handful of pharmaceutical partners and 400,000 paying customers across Thailand and Indonesia, generating $100 million in annual gross transaction volume, Ho noted. It aims to reach 5,000 healthcare providers and 600,000 patients in 2025.

The latest financing, which brings HD’s total funding to $18 million, comes less than a year after it raised a $5.6 million round.

In early 2024, HD started building an AI chatbot, Jib AI, which has been trained on anonymized healthcare product data, transaction data, and chat commerce datasets using advanced large language models. After implementing generative AI technology in its marketplace, almost 60% of customer interactions are managed by AI agents, which deliver “high-quality, instant 24/7 response to customers”, Ho said.

Jib AI helps healthcare professionals like nurses, doctors, and surgeons focus on providing quality patient care by handling most initial triaging and care navigation tasks.

Over the next 12 months, the company aims to improve its AI agent capabilities by adding order and refund processing, assisted checkouts, scheduling, electronic health record checking, and medical information retrieval with the Jib AI Health Assistant and via AI-powered asynchronous virtual care with expert physicians.

The startup also says it plans to expand its network of external partners over the next two years, focusing on insurance and pharmaceutical companies, as well as employers and educational institutions.

“While US healthcare companies such as Transcarent and Accolade started directly with B2B care navigation, we see a unique opportunity in Southeast Asia to adopt a ‘B2C2B strategy’ as defined by Andreessen Horowitz,” Ho told TechCrunch. “This approach leverages our existing B2C success to transition into B2B, effectively pursuing enterprise monetization from the outset.”