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NewView Capital leads $22.3M Series B in Australian telehealth platform Eucalyptus
Telehealth platform Eucalyptus raised a $22.3 million Series B round of funding to build a digital health portfolio for primary care in Australia.
NewView Capital led the round with participation from existing investors Blackbird Ventures and W23, and new investor AirTree Ventures. As part of the investment, Ravi Viswanathan, NewView founder and managing partner, will be joining the Eucalyptus board.
The new round gives the Sydney-based company a total of $32.8 million raised since it was founded in 2019 by Tim Doyle, Benny Kleist, Alexey Mitko and Charlie Gearside.
Australia’s healthcare system is a two-payer model, where most of the care is paid for by the government, and there is a smaller insurance coverage that is owned by individuals. Eucalyptus fits into these models as a private-pay option selling directly to consumers. In some cases, the company is able to charge lower copays for care than the average $25 per doctor visit, Doyle told TechCrunch.
He touts the company as the “largest vertically integrated telehealth platform in Australia,” serving more than 200,000 patients across four demographic-focused brands: contraception and fertility, skincare, men’s health and sexual wellness. Each brand has its own core platform of healthcare providers, patient data repository, remote monitoring tools and partnerships with pathology labs and pharmacies.
All of that results in a higher touch and higher quality relationship between doctor and patient, Doyle said.
“We are seeing an opportunity to shorten the amount of time between identification of a condition and diagnosis,” he added. “We also want to go more in-depth into diabetes, heart conditions and mental health. People are dropping out of diabetes and mental care because there are not enough touch points that are easy to use. If we can build a hub, it will make it easier to treat those conditions.”
In addition to product development, the new funding enables Eucalyptus to build toward being a major player in the telehealth industry. The company will introduce new brands in the next year around chronic care like behavioral health, weight management and diabetes.
Eucalyptus grew its revenue between 200% to 300% year over year since 2019, Doyle said. This is not unlike other startups in the digital health sector, where 2020 saw another record year for venture capital investment. He expects similar growth in 2021, including adding about 20 employees to be over 100 by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, Doyle said he is excited to work with NewView, especially with Viswanathan and principal Christina Fa, who said Eucalyptus is proving that Australia can lead in digital healthcare.
“The team is impressive in terms of clarity of vision and execution, especially in the way they brought in people to manage the brands,” she told TechCrunch. “It is unique being based in Australia where they don’t have Teledoc and other digital health companies. Instead, Eucalyptus had to build all of that in-house and do the hard work upfront. In addition, they curated a network of health providers and four brands, each with their own personalities. This allows them to be fully vertically integrated and own the customer journey.”
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Linktree raises $10.7M for its lightweight, link-centric user profiles
Simple, link-centric user profiles might not sound like a particularly ambitious idea, but it’s been more than big enough for Linktree.
The Melbourne startup says that 8 million users — whether they’re celebrities like Selena Gomez and Dua Lipa or brands like HBO and Red Bull — have created profiles on the platform, with those profiles receiving more than 1 billion visitors in September.
Plus, there are more than 28,000 new users signing up every month.
“This category didn’t exist when we started,” CEO Alex Zaccaria told me. “We created this category.”
Zaccaria said that he and his co-founders Anthony Zaccaria and Nick Humphreys created Linktree to solve a problem they were facing at their digital marketing agency Bolster. Instagram doesn’t allow users to include links in posts — all you get is a single link in your profile, prompting the constant “link in bio” reminder when someone wants to promote something.
Meanwhile, most of Bolster’s clients come from music and entertainment, where a single link can’t support what Zaccaria said is a “quite fragmented” business model. After all, an artist might want to point fans to their latest streaming album, upcoming concert dates, an online store for merchandise and more. A website could do the job in theory, but they can be clunky or slow on mobile, with users probably giving up before they finally reach the desired page.
Linktree founders Anthony Zaccaria, Alex Zaccaria and Nick Humphreys. Image via Linktree.
So instead of constantly swapping out links in Instagram and other social media profiles, a Linktree user includes one evergreen link to their Linktree profile, which they can update as necessary. Selena Gomez, for example, links to her latest songs and videos, but also her Rare Beauty cosmetics brand, her official store and articles about her nonprofit work.
Zaccaria said that after launching the product in 2016, the team quickly discovered that “a lot more people had the same problem,” leading them to fully separate Linktree and Bolster two years ago. Since then, the company hasn’t raised any outside funding — until now, with a $10.7 million Series A led by Insight Partners and AirTree Ventures. (Update: Strategic investors in the round include Twenty Minute VC’s Harry Stebbings, Patreon CTO Sam Yam and Culture Amp CTO Doug English.)
“We had the option to just continue to grow sustainably, but we wanted to pour some fuel on the fire,” Zaccaria said.
In fact, Linktree has already grown from 10 to 50 employees this year. And while the company started out by solving a problem for Instagram users, Zaccaria described it as evolving into a much broader platform that can “unify your entire digital ecosystem” and “democratize digital presence.” He said that while some customers continue to maintain “a giant, brand-immersive website,” for others, Linktree is completely replacing the idea of a standalone website.
Zaccaria added that Instagram only represents a small amount of Linktree’s current traffic, while nearly 25% of that traffic now comes from direct visitors.
Image Credits: Linktree
Black Lives Matter has also been a big part of Linktree’s recent growth, with activists and other users who want to support the movement using their profiles to point visitors to websites where they can donate, learn more and get involved. In fact, Linktree even introduced a Black Lives Matter banner over the summer that anyone could add to their profile.
Linktree is free to use, but you have to pay $6 a month for Pro features like video links, link thumbnails and social media icons.
Zaccaria said that the new funding will allow the startup to add more “functionality and analytics.” He’s particularly eager to grow the data science and analytics team, though he emphasized that Linktree does not collect personally identifiable information or monetize visitor data in any way — he just wants to provide more data to Linktree users.
In a statement, Insight Managing Director Jeff Lieberman said:
As the internet becomes increasingly fragmented, brands, publishers, and influencers need a solution to streamline their content sharing and connect their social media followers to their entire online ecosystem, ultimately increasing brand awareness and revenue. Linktree has successfully created this new “microsite” category enabling companies to monetize the next generation of the internet economy via a single interactive hub. The impressive traction and growing number of customers Linktree has gained over the last few months demonstrates its proven market fit, and we could not be more excited to work with the Linktree team as they transition to the ScaleUp phase of growth.
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Snappr raises $2M to grow its on-demand photography service
Snappr, the on-demand photography service that was part of YC’s Winter ’17 batch, has closed $2M in seed funding. Investors include Airtree Ventures (the largest VC fund in Australia, where Snappr was founded), Lars Rasmussen, co-founder of Google Maps and Justin Waldron, co-founder of Zynga. As a refresher, Snappr is a marketplace for people looking to book a photographer for a… Read More
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