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Air Doctor connects travelers to 20,000 physicians across 84 countries, with online appointments available within minutes of opening the app.
ENTRY ANGLES
Healthcare access service distributed through travel partners (bloggers, tour operators, remote work companies) · Global-by-default marketplace model for professional services across multiple countries · Specialized services for international travelers' needs beyond traditional travel agencies
VERTICALS
CAPABILITIES
Multi-country regulatory and licensing coordination, Partner distribution network management, Global marketplace infrastructure
Air Doctor makes it easy to get medical care abroad.
Travelers download the app, find a doctor in the specialty and language they need, and book an appointment. Visits can be in-person or online. The online option can happen within minutes.
Payment can be made directly, or Air Doctor can coordinate with a travel insurance policy to apply coverage.
20,000 doctors are connected to the service worldwide, with coverage concentrated in Europe. Partners are active in 2,000 cities across 84 countries.
Online availability is considerably broader than in-person, with doctors available in dozens of languages – and many are specifically noted as able to issue prescriptions accepted by local pharmacies in the country where the patient is located.
According to the founder, Air Doctor has 80,000 users (defined as anyone who has used the service at least once), with revenue growing 2.5x year over year. Revenue comes from commissions on doctor visit payments.
Air Doctor has raised $20 million to expand its presence in Asian markets, bringing total funding to $50.9 million.
Air Doctor started as a direct-to-consumer business – acquiring travelers through its own marketing. It has since transitioned to a B2B2C model, building distribution partnerships with insurance companies and travel agencies that offer the service to their own customers.
Partner companies can white-label the Air Doctor app under their own brand or embed the functionality into their existing site or app. Air Doctor provides integration support even for partners without technical resources to do it themselves.
Partnering with companies that already own the audience is the most reliable growth path for service marketplaces in any category. The same model shift is happening among startups in the repair services space.
Prolong ([reviewed here](/review/esli-obychnoe-znachit-rynok-bolshoj)), which raised €1.5 million, offers clothing, footwear, accessories, watch, and jewelry repair distributed through retail partners.
Dealt ([reviewed here](/review/deshevle-budet-prisoseditsja)), with €7 million raised, runs a freelancer marketplace for installation and repair of appliances, electronics, furniture, plumbing, HVAC systems, and more – distributed through retail stores.
Air Doctor is fundamentally a marketplace too – in this case, of doctors. Which makes the B2B2C pivot a natural fit. And for Air Doctor, accelerating distribution is especially important: 80,000 users is a tiny fraction of the 1.25 billion people who travel internationally each year.
Depending on how you look at that number, Air Doctor is either a startup with a depressingly small customer base, or one with an extraordinary amount of headroom. Its investors clearly believe the latter.
Beyond regular tourists, there's a growing population of digital nomads – people who work remotely while moving between countries continuously. They face the same healthcare access challenges as travelers, but on a recurring basis. SafetyWing ([reviewed here](/review/kochuj-bez-opaski)) built a service for exactly this group, offering travel health insurance that functions as an ongoing subscription – covering a defined number of doctor visits abroad per period. SafetyWing has raised $47.1 million, including $35 million in a single 2022 round.
At the highest level, the opportunity direction is the travel market itself, which recovered fully from the pandemic-era collapse and has since grown well past $1 trillion in annual value.
There are many ways to enter that market other than building a travel agency – and past reviews here have covered a range of them.
The strategic key is choosing a model that can be distributed through partners who already own the right audience: travel bloggers, tour operators, companies with remote workforces, and similar.
Air Doctor's specific format has an interesting structural property: it's global by default. You can't build a marketplace for doctors in 84 countries while staying focused on a single home market. The "let's prove it domestically first" excuse doesn't apply. Which is actually liberating. And with over a billion international travelers per year, the motivation to make that leap is pretty obvious.