NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Thursday, July 25, 2019

By Yoolim Lee and David Ramli

Jonathan Sudharta was a brawl-prone, unremarkable student who played in a rock band. Friends of his father, a self-made tycoon, feared he’d one day take over the family medical business and ruin it.

Instead, in 2016, at the age of 34, Sudharta co-founded a startup that attracted the interest of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and today becomes the organization’s first ever equity investment in an online health-care platform.

His creation, Halodoc, is trying to address one of the biggest problems in medicine: In a world with too few doctors and hundreds of millions of people without proper access to clinics, how can people get the diagnosis and drugs they need quickly and cheaply?

“Someone is going to solve patient-centric, 21st century, primary health care and we think that Halodoc has a huge potential to do that,” said David Rossow, London-based founding partner of the Gates Foundation’s Strategic Investment Fund.

Photo courtesy of Seika.