BetterDoctor Files for IPO: Revolutionizing Physician Discovery with Data-Driven Matching Platform

In daily life, people often choose doctors for appointments based on recommendations from friends or reviews on anonymous websites. Hearsay invariably brings a sense of unease and doubt: Is this doctor truly skilled in treating my (or my family member’s) condition? What is the basis for such claims? Even when moving to an entirely unfamiliar area, finding a suitable doctor before becoming acquainted with the local medical resources can be a significant headache for most people. In the United States, more than 70 million patients are either facing the challenge of changing doctors or require additional treatment measures.

Based on this, Ari Tulla (now the CEO of BetterDoctor) founded the BetterDoctor website and developed its associated mobile app. The purpose of creating the BetterDoctor website was to streamline the process of seeking medical care, transforming the once cumbersome task of finding a doctor into a professional and convenient experience. By enabling users to search for the best-matched physicians based on specific criteria, it achieves a seamless online-to-offline (O2O) loop, integrating online doctor selection with offline medical consultations.

The general process involves first selecting a target physician and entering insurance plan information. The website then displays a ranked list of credentialed physicians, from which patients can make their own selection.Users can also register via Facebook or save doctors to their favorites, and share and recommend their preferred physicians.The specific flowchart is shown below.：


Target Audience
√ Location: Users who have moved to a new community
√ Specialist: Users urgently seeking a specialist physician
√ Insurance: Users who are subject to different insurance systems due to a change in employment
With BetterDoctor, finding a doctor and seeking medical advice is no longer a difficult task.
Key Features of BetterDoctor: It provides you with comprehensive information on all doctors in your area to facilitate your selection. This includes details such as graduation from top medical schools, residency training at premier hospitals, board certifications obtained, the number of specific procedures performed, and the quantity of related research papers published. In addition to these objective criteria, BetterDoctor also considers Yelp reviews and records of past medical malpractice. Only doctors who pass this comprehensive evaluation receive a special identifier and are ranked at the top of search results, while those with relatively lower ratings appear at the bottom of the page. This allows users to select the most trustworthy physicians based on an overall assessment.

So, how does it achieve the aforementioned objectives? Its core technology lies in possessing a highly effective evaluation system.BetterDoctor’s evaluation system is objective and comprehensive, driven by data. It assesses based on three questions and six criteria.



Company Founding Background
BetterDoctor is an O2O healthcare application co-founded by Ari Tulla and his friend Tapio Tolvanen in August 2011. Looking back, this was a period of declining fortunes for Nokia, the company where both men were employed. Ari Tulla resigned from his position as head of Nokia’s software studio to discuss with Tapio Tolvanen the establishment of BetterDoctor. Their goal was to address the inefficiencies of the U.S. healthcare system by streamlining processes, with the aim of building BetterDoctor into an efficient and professional search engine for finding physicians that includes competency rankings. Leveraging social reviews, physician communication communities, and other public or private data—including peer referrals among doctors—BetterDoctor provides users with a one-stop platform for reviewing, filtering, scheduling, and booking medical appointments, tailored to meet their specific standards and requirements.
In fact, there is a story behind the founding of BetterDoctor. Ten years ago, Tulla’s wife was diagnosed with a serious illness, and the couple spent several months traveling across Europe in search of suitable doctors. Unexpectedly, a transfer order forced Tulla to relocate his entire family to the United States, requiring them to start their medical journey anew. The U.S. healthcare system is complex and fraught with numerous drawbacks; Tulla described it as a “maze.” “I am now undoubtedly an expert at navigating mazes,” Tulla joked self-deprecatingly. “At that time, we drove across the entire Baja California Peninsula, consulting 40 doctors along the way. Those memories are truly too painful to recall.”



Comparison with Other Companies
BetterDoctor faces considerable competition. ZocDoc, founded in 2007, is also an online physician appointment platform that provides access to doctors’ office and clinic schedules, enabling patients to book appointments instantly without making phone calls or enduring wait times of several months. Its search page offers a wide range of filtering options, including disease type, location, insurance coverage, visit purpose, language, physician gender, and pediatric specialists. Patients can use the online service free of charge, while physicians are included in the ZocDoc database upon paying a monthly fee of $250. Therefore, calculating the company’s revenue is straightforward: it simply requires knowing the number of physicians enrolled in ZocDoc.


Healthgrades is an online healthcare quality rating and services company that provides comprehensive information on the top-rated doctors and hospitals in the United States, along with quality ratings for both physicians and healthcare facilities. On each physician’s detailed profile page, users can view the doctor’s resume, quality metrics of their affiliated hospital, patient satisfaction reviews, as well as appointment phone numbers and addresses. Similar to BetterDoctor, it allows users to directly look up travel routes via an integrated map.
Unlike ZocDoc’s online instant appointment booking (a feature module that will definitely be added in the future), BetterDoctor currently offers a curated list of top-rated physicians. Users can contact these doctors by phone; upon selecting a physician, Google Maps is displayed with a direct link to the address navigation page. Additionally, it provides customized healthcare services tailored to customers’ health insurance plans, akin to a medical version of OpenTable and Yelp.(Note: OpenTable is currently the leading online dining reservation platform in the United States, offering convenient online restaurant reservations via mobile and desktop; Yelp is the largest review website in the United States, similar to China’s Dianping.)Thus, BetterDoctor integrates certain features of ZocDoc and Healthgrades to create a new website model.
BetterDoctor’s medical data is sourced from Yelp, Doximity, and the National Provider Identifier (NPI) registry; it took nearly a year and a half just to build the database. From its inception, the website attracted numerous venture capital firms as early-stage investors, including Burrill & Company, Commerce Ventures, Kima Ventures, Lifeline Ventures, 500 Startups, MESA+, and SoftTech VC.



Company History
At its initial launch, the app included only about 5,000 internists across five medical specialties. After a six-month public beta test in 2012, the nationwide physician search service was officially launched on September 10 of that year. Users can log in via the website or mobile app, while physicians access the platform through the “Doctor Dashboard.”
By 2013, the platform had expanded to cover 60 medical specialties, with over 1.1 million physicians registered and more than 4 million users leveraging BetterDoctor to find doctors. At that time, a key challenge remained in securing physician participation. Because BetterDoctor employed a “quality screening system,” only physicians who met specific standards were permitted to practice on the platform. Although many physicians passed the screening, they were generally dissatisfied with this listing and certification mechanism. To break the deadlock, BetterDoctor’s founders decided to revamp the approach, aiming not only to help patients find doctors but also to enable physicians to perform more effectively. The revised model required registered physicians to pay for listed status in order to display their profiles, with BetterDoctor serving as a reference for career advancement. To avoid biased outcomes—for instance, where physicians with exceptionally high click-through rates might not necessarily possess superior clinical skills—the service incorporated both patient and peer reviews to ensure accurate assessments of medical competence. Furthermore, BetterDoctor prohibited any advertising on its platform to prevent disruptions to users’ quick search for physicians, and it excluded from its database any physicians involved in medical disputes.
In October 2013, as the Internet gained increasing momentum, the co-founders focused on developing iOS and Android clients, enabling users to access physician profiles provided by BetterDoctor from their mobile devices, thereby making it more convenient to find a doctor.
In July 2014, it was reported that the website’s basic services would remain free, with plans to introduce paid premium services targeting potential patients and physicians. Soon after, BetterDoctor planned to charge fees for high-quality physicians certified by the platform.

Company Team

The core team consists of six members, namely:
Ari Tulla is the company’s co-founder and CEO. He previously served as a brand specialist at BAT companies and later as head of Nokia’s software studio, bringing 10 years of experience in developing innovative products with superior user experiences.
Tapio Tolvanen is the company’s CTO and co-founder. He previously served as a software designer at Intel and as head of the technology department at Nokia.
Hao Tele, who has worked at Nanjing University and Aalto University, has always served as an Assistant Researcher.
Anders Rex is a website engineer at BetterDoctor.
Andrew Kobylinski, responsible for the company's business expansion and business development.
Matt Levy serves as the company’s Vice President of Research and Development.

It is evident that the BetterDoctor team does not consist of professionals with backgrounds in healthcare or medicine; their prior work experience has been primarily in consumer services or marketing. For this reason, BetterDoctor does not provide professional medical diagnostic services. Instead, it offers ancillary services related to the healthcare ecosystem, aiming to bring transparency to clinicians’ treatment capabilities by providing physician rankings and objective evaluations, thereby enabling patients to quickly identify high-quality doctors.

Financing Status
On May 1, 2012, BetterDoctor secured $525,000 in Series A funding from eight investors, primarily individual angels, including two of BetterDoctor’s co-founders: • Steve Wolfe (Vice President, Client Services @ LiveOffice) • Tapio Tolvanen (CTO & Co-Founder @ BetterDoctor) • Ari Tulla (CEO & Co-Founder @ BetterDoctor) • Devon George (COO @ Prolific Interactive) • Jason Johnson (Co-founder @ Rethink Books) • Jack Kokko (Founder and Chief Executive Officer @ AlphaSense) • Philip Settimi • Erik Engelson (Founder and CEO @ Medina Medical)
On October 22, 2013, BetterDoctor secured $2.6 million in seed funding from investors including Initial Capital, Burrill & Company, Commerce Ventures, Kima Ventures, Lifeline Ventures, 500 Startups, Mesa Ventures, and SoftTech VC.
On July 1, 2014, BetterDoctor secured $10 million in Series A funding from investors including New Enterprise Associates, SoftTech VC, Lifeline Ventures, Jaan Tallinn, and Commerce Ventures.

(Compiled by: Zhou Yanxun; Edited by: Zhang Nan)

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