Mediately, the Slovenian mobile and web app that makes drug information accessible to doctors, has just raised €7.2M in Series A to expand across more European markets. The round is led by the London-based Piton Capital and is joined by existing investors Silicon Gardens Funds, LAUNCHub Ventures, as well as by VentureFriends and angel investors.
The application enables doctors to make better decisions by organizing and simplifying complex medical content, then localizing it for each market and offering it for free to doctors in their language. Mediately also allows pharmaceutical companies to reach a large group of doctors who use the app and inform them about new therapies and clinical research, and receive insights about the clinical challenges they stumble across.
One of the first investors in Mediately, back in 2014 was the Sofia-based LAUNCHub Ventures, and Stanislav Sirakov, General Partner at LAUNCHub Ventures, shares that the team of LAUNCHub is impressed by the wide penetration of the app among European doctors, the dedication of the team to the cause of equipping doctors with the best possible software assistance, and the immense daily usage of the product in each market.
“Mediately has successfully attracted and engaged a famously hard to own but lucrative segment: doctors. The organic growth is driven by word of mouth, the impressive share of daily active doctors on the app, and the passionate doctor reviews are all strong indicators that the team has built an app with real value for the medical professional,” Mira Mihaylova, Principal at Piton Capital, comments in the press release.
Making medical knowledge accessible
Mediately provides doctors with a mobile medical assistant that adapted not only to the language in each market but also to the local healthcare environment.
According to Blaz Triglav, CEO at Mediately, doctors should have access to the best decision support in their work, whether they work in a top private clinic or in a remote family doctor office because that is the only way that the health of patients could improve.
The company has developed two products – Mediately Medical Assistant which provides a full suite of drugs information, decision support tools, and accredited education for doctors and Mediately RheumaHelper which is a mobile assistant for rheumatology professionals.
Monetization through a B2B model
In order to offer its app free of charge to the end-users, doctors, Mediately works with pharmaceutical businesses providing them with the chance to reach more than 160K registered doctors through its digital channels. Thus, the app works as a B2B marketing channel for the pharmaceutical industry.
Mediately works with 28 of the top 30 global pharma companies, together with which it has created over 150 digital campaigns to improve disease awareness and diagnosis and to educate doctors on new therapeutic approaches. Some of its clients include names such as Novartis, AstraZeneca, Roche, Pfizer, Bayer, and GSK.
According to IQVIA research, around 30% of doctors are getting their information from digital channels, while companies from the pharma industry continue to invest around 99% of their marketing spent in offline channels. And this is where the value proposition of Mediately comes into place.
The future of app-assisted healthcare
Being certified as a medical device in the EU, Mediately is used more than 3 million times every month and has over 100K active doctors in the last 30 days. In its current markets, the app has reached market shares of 80% to 90% of all doctors. As of now, Mediately is available to doctors in Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Italy. The company employs around 50 people.
“We are very excited about Mediately’s potential to become the leading medical knowledge platform for European doctors. Moreover, it is also a powerful channel for pharmaceutical companies, allowing them to communicate with doctors in a less intrusive, more scalable, and measurable way. Given the exceptional team and product, the success of the company in the CEE can be replicated across larger Western European markets,” Apostolos Apostolakis, Founding Partner at VentureFriends, comments.
Mediately plans to invest the raised capital into expanding beyond its current 8 markets into the rest of Europe to bring helpful medical assistance to all 1.7M European doctors.
