- Lloyd Price
'Healthcare platform Doctolib has conquered France — but can it take on Europe?'
Exec Summary:
Lloyd Price, HealthTech M&A Advisor and Partner at Nelson Advisors shares his thoughts with Daphné Leprince-Ringuet from Sifted discussing Doctolib, their continued success, big future and potential next moves.
'Few startups in France can claim to have changed the way people behave in as systemic a way as Doctolib. Launched in 2013 by Stanislas Niox-Chateau, Doctolib has become a key component of the country’s healthcare system. Its first product — an online booking platform that lets patients schedule doctor appointments — saw huge adoption in a sector with very little digitisation.
Today, the company covers “almost all of the French population”, says Doctolib’s CFO Pierre Vergnes. It counts 80m patient accounts spanning three countries, of which the vast majority remains in France. Doctolib also has 19m users in Germany, which it expanded to in 2016, and a “nascent” number of users in Italy, launched in 2021.
During the Covid pandemic, the French government selected the company as an official partner to manage vaccination appointments. “[In France], they’re a utility company for running healthcare infrastructure now,” says Lloyd Price, a healthtech M&A advisor.
It’s not only patients. Across all three markets, 900k healthcare professionals have signed up to Doctolib, including 200k in Germany. About half are paying customers who, in addition to the patient booking management system, also use premium features that the company added later on to support doctors, such as teleconsultation services and an all-in-one platform to manage patient medical information as well as take notes during consultations.
The company is one of France’s highest-valued private tech companies, having secured a €5.8bn valuation when it raised a mammoth €500m equity and debt funding round in 2022. With nearly €300m in revenue, Vergnes says that Doctolib is on track to be profitable in 2025 –– and two sources with direct knowledge who, like others in this article chose to remain anonymous to protect relationships, tell Sifted that it already is in France. Doctolib declined to confirm.'
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