As part of the startup Interview series, we are going to interview Mr. Raul Källo from Viveo Health, an Estonian company working on a fast, simple, and secure e-health platform making healthcare accessible to everyone.
Raul, thanks for taking the time to catch up with us. Can you briefly outline the company’s story, what is Viveo Health’s key goal? Who are the founders and how it all became what it is today?
we want to bring digital health to 1 billion people by 2025. I started Viveo with an idea to bundle digital health, offline clinics and private health insurance. My background is the insurance industry. I started my global insurance brokerage business at the age of 21 and it made me successful. We joined forces with an early employer of Playtech, Viljam Põdra, who became our CTO. We do believe in a very high talent tensity and continuously searching for the best people.
What kind of products and services does your company offer?
We offer an end-to-end digital health marketplace that connects doctors with patients. Doctors can take their practices online, patients can have comfortable appointments digitally and offline. Without our technology, insurance companies can’t be competitive in 5 years’ time. We built Viveo to create value for all the stakeholders in healthcare.
What’s the latest progress in the project, and what are you focusing on right now?
I do believe there is no MVP in healthcare. Finally, we have reached the stadium, where we are dealing with good problems, we are currently onboarding more than 200K customers and will reach breakeven shortly. Our main focus now is on growth.
What pain of your customers are you helping solve? What is your company’s offering and what kind of customers and partners are you looking for?
We want to make healthcare personalized and data-driven. Half of the world’s population does not have proper access to healthcare. We want to reduce the gap by offering simpler, faster and cheaper access to healthcare.
What differentiates Viveo Health from its competitors?
We created tech that is 10 times better than our competitors, we have a very strong team on the execution.
Do you use AI technology in your product? How does it work for you?
We see that we need to take doctors online first, scale, and then add extra features. We can add AI later, and our view on that is to first help doctors to make more accurate decisions having all the support from data science and AI. We believe that one doctor can service much more patients having our tech than doing it on his own.
Do you have any projects related to COVID-19 research? If so, can you explain how your product is contributing to a global fight against coronavirus?
We started our own foundation Viveo Cares, a charitable initiative that is providing free consultations to those in need: Telehealth is the safest way both for the doctors and patients to have interaction in times of the viruses
What is your business model and how are you planning to get early customers onboard? Have you already raised money for your operations and building the platform?
Our business model is freemium marketplace model, meaning we do not charge for registration and get a commission on each transaction. Our marketplace model allows multiple sources of revenue from different stakeholders, such as pharmacies, diagnostic clinics, and we offer additional healthcare packages that can be sold to existing customers. We have customer engagement teams in the countries, and we have automated customer flows.
What milestones have you had in fundraising and where are you now?
To start I invested 2M euros – my own money. Later on, angel investors who are the most successful business leaders from Estonia; Finland, Ukraine, and the US joined. They added an extra 3M to the business. We are in talks with selected investors.
What was it like growing your team? What are the challenges and surprises you encountered? What tips do you have for building a solid team?
From 3 people, we have grown the team to 70 in a couple of years. The biggest challenge is to hire great people. I believe in a very high talent density. I do believe great people create good companies. We even have a former President of Estonia in our team.
What are your company’s plans for the future, your major dream in 2021?
We are working towards the goal of helping 1B people. Our dream for 2021 is to set a very strong base for that. Our plan is to revolutionize the customer journey in healthcare and with the tools that we are providing, make it accessible for more people.
What do you think about the business climate in Estonia and in the EU in general?
doing business in Estonia is great, it takes only 48h to open a business and the country is the number 1 in e-health. As for the EU, frameworks and regulations need to be put in place so that healthcare becomes each time less dependent on specific country rules. We want healthcare to become borderless, as the technology for that is already out there.
To summarize our interview I would like to ask your opinion about the future of the HealthTech industry, especially considering the impact of pandemics and all this economic turbulence.
Digital health is the only way to go if we want healthcare to become accessible to everyone.
