Uber Eats gets $14M seed from a16z to fix WhatsApp mess for Latin American doctors

Caroline Mirren, who spent nearly a decade developing on-demand services as Uber Eats’ first general manager in Latin America and then COO of Rappi, realized how badly healthcare technology was lagging behind. While patients have come to expect doctors to respond as quickly as their delivery apps, most medical professionals on the continent are forced to rely on WhatsApp for all patient communications.

“I thought, as a patient, and especially as an American, how incredible it would be that I could text my doctor on WhatsApp, and they would respond,” she told TechCrunch.

But Mirren also realized how much this method of communication affected doctors. She said: “A doctor who sees 20 patients during the day comes home, has 100 messages and is expected to respond immediately and remembers who the patient is without the health record in front of him.”

Mirren, who had long been interested in building her own startup, saw an opportunity to improve communication challenges among doctors. So, I launched two years ago Leona’s healthan AI-powered co-pilot integrated with doctors’ WhatsApp accounts.

Leona revealed on Tuesday that it had raised $14 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from General Catalyst; acceleration; Maven Clinic CEO Kate Ryder; Nubank CEO David Velez; and Rappi CEO Simone Borrero. The startup also announced that its service is now available to doctors in 14 Latin American countries across 22 medical specialties.

With Leona, patients continue to send messages via WhatsApp, but doctors receive and manage these communications through the startup’s mobile app. The app sorts all messages by priority, suggests responses, and allows other team members (such as doctors or nurses) to respond to patients on the doctor’s behalf.

The startup will also soon launch a fully autonomous agent that will handle chat scheduling and simple ingestion.

Solving the WhatsApp communication challenge in Latin America is crucial because, according to Mirren, patients in Latin America often choose their doctors based on their desire to communicate using this channel.

“These poor doctors, they’re getting requests for very serious medical consultations, like ‘I need a letter for my kids’ school,’ or ‘I need a receipt for my appointment last week,'” Mirren said.

Since these messages can arrive in the evenings and on weekends, doctors often have to monitor their WhatsApp messages around the clock. Leona solves this problem by immediately alerting doctors only to the most serious health requests and allowing them to de-prioritize routine or administrative issues.

“The idea is to help the doctor get back time,” Mirren said. “We’ve heard from our users that they save two to three hours a day by using Leona.”

While Leona started out serving Latin America, the company’s long-term mission is to expand its services to other geographies, where, unlike in the United States, patients also request and are allowed to communicate with their doctors via WhatsApp, rather than electronic medical records systems like Epic.

Leona’s 13-person team is currently split between Mexico City and Silicon Valley, where, according to Mirren, the best AI engineers are located.