Where it all began,
When the stakes are high, we need accurate, concrete, and fast answers. Especially when it is about our loved ones. This is how I felt as a father, when my newborn daughter Lean had a pain in her ears. I called her doctor late night, to get any sort of help. His only answer was to come see him in clinic second day. He did not have an appointment and can only accommodate us on a waiting list. I had to skip work me and my wife, wait for four hours in the waiting room, see the doctor, and get out in less than ten minutes with a solution I have already known. In my mind I wished I had that answer 12 hours ago. I was not alone in this journey; the 4 hours were the average waiting time in the waiting rooms across the Saudi Arabia.
You might not know me, I am Wael A. Kabli the CEO of Cura. This was the story of why I have created Cura back in 2016. I am going to tell you about Cura, what do we do and what we have achieved so far?
What is Cura?
Cura is a Saudi state-of-the-art telehealth platform that enables people to get consultations, diagnosis and prescriptions and well-being therapy sessions through instant messaging and live video calls from the comfort of smart phones.
What do we do?
Cura basically provides online urgent care service to consumers, available 24/7 across the kingdom with access to family medicine doctors in less than 5 minutes.
And for those who are looking for consultants and specialists, we cover more than 200+ medical specialties with guaranteed response in less than 24 hours. Our doctors’ network is larger than the top four healthcare providers combined in Saudi.
Not only that, but we also do not wait for people to get sick; our wellness programs are designed to work proactively with you to achieve your health goals such as reducing stress, following-up on pregnancy or losing weight.
We also, license our solutions to hospitals and governments. One of our top customers is the Saudi Ministry of Health. To-date (Sep 2020), our technology powered more than 2M Medical consultations and trained more than 5,000 doctors on telemedicine.
The Telemedicine Journey in Saudi…
For long time, telemedicine was illegal and couple of companies were closed due to practicing telemedicine. We have worked closely with the regulator who wrote the telemedicine regulation and to be the first licensed company to practice medicine online safely. We heavily participated in the Saudi telemedicine policies prepared by the Saudi Health Council. Many entered the market because of our efforts. Today, we are the only telemedicine platform who accepts major health insurances (Bupa and MedGulf) and have the ability to issue online e-prescriptions with acceptance in all pharmacies.
How this work business wise?
Our business model is simple yet scalable, we share revenues with doctors, and provide pay-as-you-go services for consumers (pay per consult) and subscriptions for corporates. We turned into profitability since 2019.
COVID 19, the test…
COVID 19 for us was the real test. Because of the lock down, it was our chance to show the country, the customers and mostly ourselves as a team that we are a reliable service. People counted on us to get prescriptions and get medical opinions safely when everything was closed. This is when we started growing more than 15-20% MOM. Our Customers cared so deeply about our products and more than 15K people took the time to write paragraphs and paragraphs of positive reviews to our doctors and staff. And at any point of time, 75% of our customers will come back to us and buy more of our health services.
The Market…
The global Digital health and telemedicine markets are booming specially after COVID 19 pandemic, and the Middle East telemedicine market is estimated to be $16.7Bn by 2026.
We have few competitors, most of them either do physical appointments or have inadequate medical practice.
The Team…
The Founders are two old friends, software engineers, 25 years of collective experience and previous technology startups. We have a strong medical team to handle medical operations. We won multiple local such as ArabNet in Riyadh and regional awards such as Alsabah awards in Kuwait and Step Conference in Dubai.
Why am I writing this?
Finally, this is my ask, so please pay attention to this, we started expanding to Bahrain this year, and we are looking to expand to UAE, Kuwait, Jordan, and Egypt in the coming years. So, if you know somebody who can help us in this expansion, please let us talk. Otherwise, the next time you want to see a doctor, please download Cura.
Thank you very much and I am happy to receive any questions you have.