Leona Health, a startup founded by Caroline Merin, raised US$14 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. The round included the participation of General Catalyst, Kate Ryder (CEO of Maven Clinic), David Vélez (CEO of Nubank) and Simón Borrero (CEO of Rappi).
The support of a16z, one of the most prestigious venture capital funds in Silicon Valley, along with the participation of leaders of the Latin American fintech and startup ecosystem such as Vélez and Borrero, validates Leona Salud’s commitment to solving a critical problem in regional healthcare.
Caroline Merin, who spent almost a decade developing on-demand services as the first Latin American General Manager of Uber Eats and then COO of Rappi, identified a critical problem in regional healthcare: Latin American doctors depend on WhatsApp for all their communication with patients, generating overload and professional burnout.
Leona Health: From on-demand delivery to solving the WhatsApp chaos
“A doctor who sees 20 patients during the day, comes home, has 100 messages and is expected to respond immediately and remember who the patient is without the medical history in front of him,” Merin told TechCrunch.
Leona’s innovation is to function as an AI co-pilot integrated with doctors’ WhatsApp accounts. Patients still send messages on WhatsApp, but doctors receive and manage that communication through the Leona mobile app, which prioritizes all messages, suggests responses, and allows other team members to respond on the doctor’s behalf.
Savings of up to three hours a day for doctors
The startup immediately alerts doctors to only the most serious health requests, allowing them to deprioritize routine or administrative issues.
The service is available to doctors in 14 Latin American countries covering 22 medical specialties. “Solving the challenge of communication through WhatsApp is essential because Latin American patients often choose doctors based on their willingness to communicate through this channel,” explains Merin.
With the funding raised, the company will soon launch a fully autonomous agent that will handle conversational scheduling and simple admission. The 13-person team is split between Mexico City and Silicon Valley, and plans to expand its services to other countries where patients also communicate with doctors via WhatsApp.
