Russia-based internet company Yandex and private equity fund Baring Vostok Capital Partners have invested $5.5m in Doc+, acquiring a minority stake in the company.
The deal was revealed last week by Russian business publication RBC, based on exchanges with the startup’s co-founder Victor Belogub, and confirmed by the investors.
The deal was led by Baring Vostok. Neither the terms of the deal nor the investors’ respective contributions have been disclosed.
The service debuted in September 2015. In the same year, the company raised its first investment – a total of RUB35m (roughly $500,000 at the time) from a group of individual investors.
Among them were Florian Jansen, a top executive at Lamoda.ru, OneTwoTrip’s CEO Mikhail Sokolov, and Winter Capital’s executive director Mikhail Tsyferov.
Serving the Russian capital and surrounding areas, Doc+ partners with over 15 Russian medical insurance companies.
Since its start, the service has performed 12,000 calls with a call price of RUB2,900 in Moscow and RUB2,000 in other areas of the Moscow region.
The funds raised by Doc+ will be spent on reaching out to new regions. Belogub plans to launch Doc+ in St. Petersburg next fall, and in other cities of Russia over the next two or three years.Part of the investors’ money will go to the expansion of services and to marketing efforts.
“The new big story”
Doc+ intends to engage in telemedicine (delivery of medical services remotely) after the law will expectedly authorise such activities, following a draft bill introduced in late May.
Medical services will be the “new big story for the Russian market,” said a Yandex spokesperson cited by RBC. Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in mid-June, Yandex VP for corporate relations Marina Yanina said that the company would be interested to create a “medical service.”
Such a service would allow users to store all information about their health, systematically be treated and be given advice.
The Russian search company has also announced the development of a remote diagnosis of cancer platform with the participation of AstraZeneca and Yandex Data Factory, RBC has reported.
Baring Vostok is among the most established Russian investment funds, with investments in Yandex and Ozon, a leading online retailer, at very early stages. Its most recent major tech investment went to 2GIS, an ambitious online mapping service company from Siberia, in November 2015, as reported by East-West Digital News.
– This article first appeared in East-West Digital News, the international online resource on Russian digital industries.