With $1.2M From Greylock, Yuri Milner And 500 Startups, First Opinion Lets You Text A Doctor Anytime
As mobile networks and digital communication tools improve, there's a huge opportunity to re-imagine the calcified old world of healthcare. Some services are looking to do that by bringing …
Context & Ripple Effects
Consumer health is getting rebuilt one interface at a time: Meddik took a run at replacing the WebMD information dump back in May 2012, and just last month Doctor On Demand launched a $3M-backed $40 virtual house call built on live video. First Opinion goes one channel cheaper and more casual — asynchronous texting with a doctor available anytime — on a notably smaller $1.2M seed.
The investor lineup is as much the story as the product. Yuri Milner is extending a healthcare streak that includes his November 2013 bet on GenapSys and plummeting gene-sequencing costs, while Greylock is putting the round to work out of the $1B fourteenth fund it raised in September 2013.
First-order effects
- Users get an always-on text line to a doctor, positioning First Opinion directly against Doctor On Demand's paid per-call video model on both price and friction.
Second-order effects
- Doctor On Demand and the wider virtual-care field must now defend against a messaging-first entrant whose unit economics don't depend on booking billable video sessions, pushing differentiation toward insurance integration and employer channels.
Third-order effects
- If triage migrates from waiting rooms to message threads, the pressure lands on regulators and payers to define reimbursement and liability rules for doctor-patient contact that happens outside scheduled visits.
The trend: Consumer healthcare is moving from static information portals toward always-on, messaging-first access to physicians, with each new entrant lowering the cost and friction of reaching a doctor.