Our investment in Siilo — elegantly revolutionizing healthcare, from the bottom up.
Today, we’re proud to announce EQT Ventures’ investment in Siilo, a secure mobile messaging service bringing medical teams together. The healthcare sector has lagged painfully behind in productivity gains from digitization. While medical teams have access to cutting-edge medical technology, the software tools at their disposal are dusty and out-dated at best, and broken and despised at worst. Siilo, however, has been making tremendous strides, winning over medical teams across Europe and the globe with an elegant product experience and bottom-up demand as an engine for growth.
EQT Ventures’ thesis for investing in health tech is to back companies 1) levelling information flows and communication, and 2) using information and data at scale to bring patients, healthcare professionals, and others in the ecosystem closer together. The team has a history of investing in transformative health tech companies like Natural Cycles, Noomi, Min Doktor and MyTomorrows, among others, and we’re proud to add another potential category winner to the group. This follows a long tradition of healthcare investing across EQT more broadly, with more than €15 billion invested in healthcare companies globally.
When we met the founders — Joost, Arvind and Onno — we were immediately inspired by their grand and refreshing vision. The idea for Siilo originated from Joost’s own experience (and frustrations) as a surgery resident trying to coordinate basic yet critical communication. The glaring absence of a simple tool, with the basic features we take for granted in consumer apps, has led medical professionals to take matters into their own hands. According to British Medical Journal research, 98.9% of UK hospital clinicians now have smartphones, with 33% admitting to using consumer messaging apps and 46% using pictures to send patient-related clinical information with their colleagues. This practice obviously comes with compliance and privacy risks. However, given the urgency of patient care and the alternatives, such as waiting for someone to answer a landline or a fax (!), consumer apps have been the path of least resistance — and everyone deserves better.
Recognizing the issues, Joost decided to build Siilo, bringing two key game changers:
- Users are able to get up and running directly in a familiar yet secure UX, with simple yet powerful tools tailored to the clinical environment. Meaning, it actually gets used.
- Users become part of an active global network of connected, verified professionals. As a result, doctors can easily find the right expert, ask a question, and get a reply back in a split second.
Removing friction and unlocking access to the world’s medical expertise securely is a transformative step for efficiency in healthcare. Better still, it can bring higher quality of care to patients globally.
In terms of security and compliance, Siilo has achieved level 3 status assessed as a NHS Business Partner and has ISO-27001 certification. When an entire organization wants to get on board, it can also integrate Siilo Connect. This secure offering is not only elegant for users, but a major technical achievement worth acknowledging. Here, Onno’s firsthand experiences building eBuddy, where he saw 450m users and 17 billion messages monthly, have proved an invaluable asset.
At EQT Ventures, we believe Siilo is well positioned to change the way medical teams work and bring better and more efficient care to patients worldwide. We’re humbled that the team chose EQT Ventures to support them on their important journey, and we’re looking forward to helping them scale.
