Computer science whiz Dylan Coyne sparked up an idea for a telehealth platform in 2021 when he realised working a 9-5 didn’t leave you with much time to see a doctor. Three years later, Updoc, the company he co-founded with Clifton Hodgkinson, has served more than 200,000 customers to date and banked $20 million in funding.
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Seeing a doctor when you work conventional office hours can be tricky. And so, Dylan Coyne and Clifton Hodgkinson decided to solve that problem with Updoc. This online digital healthcare platform enables patient consultations to chat with a health practitioner remotely.
To date, Updoc’s facilitated consultations for more than 200,000 customers, and in May this year, it banked its first round of funding: $20 million in a round led by Bailador Technologies, the same fund behind InstaScripts, which it exited in mid-2023 in a $135 million buyout by Wesfarmers.
“When you work week in, week out, looking at the numbers, it can seem like the numbers aren’t changing,” Coyne says. “But, if you zoom out monthly or quarterly, it gives you a lot more confidence. We have a small but capable team, and we’re all aligned to make convenient and accessible healthcare and use technology to lead us to scale.”
28-year-old Coyne, a computer science co-op graduate from the University of Sydney, worked for product and engineering teams at WiseTech Global and IBM before joining Uber Australia in 2016 in the driver onboarding team. There, he noticed a common thread: technology was being used to make life simpler.
“You can get an Uber or transport by pressing a button or get whatever you want off Amazon with a click, but you can’t do the same with healthcare. So, it was a great opportunity to see how my product and technology experience could be used to create a platform that connects patients and doctors to provide accessible, safe and convenient healthcare.”
And that’s Updoc’s main game: patients can fill in an online form and request a consultation with one of Updoc’s 100 doctors or practitioners in a matter of minutes and, in most cases, receive a call back within a few hours.
It’s not just convenient for users; Coyne and his 30-strong team also hope to take pressure off the nation’s public healthcare system.
“About 50% of people that use Updoc would either have gone to a hospital’s emergency department – so, used up public resources – or they would have either delayed or not sought care at all. So, just providing this care, which otherwise may not have been available, is great.”
And Coyne notes it wasn’t the co-founders’ first rodeo: they’d started a previous venture together (an electric bike subscription company).
“That allowed us to iron out how a business operates, how to manage people and how to market and create a great product. So, when we did start Updoc, we were in a great position – we had that experience and a great working relationship, took what we learned, and applied it to the healthcare industry.”
Coyne and Hodgkinson bootstrapped Updoc until its 2024 raise, intending to delay a capital raise as long as possible. They were named one of Deloitte’s fastest-growing start-ups in 2023, with a near-16000% growth. With their latest investment, Updoc plans to accelerate the development of its product roadmap and continue its expansion. While that may include international expansion at some point, Coyne says there’s a huge opportunity to tackle at home.
“There are over 150 million consults per year in Australia, and we cover a sliver of them at the moment. So, we see a lot of room to grow here.”
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