Big winner from the coronaviruswhich has democratized digital uses, particularly in e-health with remote appointment scheduling and teleconsultationDoctolib raises this Tuesday, March 15 an additional 500 million euros from the French funds Eurazeo and Bpifrance.
Three years after its previous mega-lift – then 150 million euros -, Doctolib becomes the most valued French Tech startup, at 5.8 billion euros. The Parisian nugget breaks the Back Market record (5.1 billion euros), which had itself in January battu le record de Qonto (4.4 billion euros), which had itself exceeded for barely a day of Sorare (3.7 billion euros).
Short, Doctolib becomes the new – probably short-lived – champion of French Tech, and now weighs more than listed champions such as OVHCloud (4.4 billion euros), and also large historical groups such as Air-France-KLM (2.42 billion euros), Casino (1.71 billion euros), Atos (2.87 billion euros) or even Faurecia (3.7 billion euros).
“Winner takes it all”: when money wins the market
This new money will allow the startup to recruit massively, in France and in Europe, to continue its extraordinary hypergrowth. Stanislas Niox-Chateau, the CEO and founder of the French unicorn, thus announces 3,500 new job creations in the next five years, spread over 30 cities in France, but also in Germany and Italy, where he bought out local challenger Dottori last fall. In detail, Doctolib intends to expand into 30 cities in France: in Paris of course, where the company’s head office is located, but also in Nantes – where 750 people already work – and in all the medium-sized urban areas of territory.
The startup is thus adopting a very effective strategy in the world of tech: “winner takes it all”. To do this, you have to raise massive amounts of money and use it to quickly conquer the market, become the leader, and then stifle the competition. The recipe worked in France, where Doctolib dominates the market to such an extent that the government relied on it to organize the vaccine strategy against Covid-19. Thus, most of its 60 million users, divided between France, Germany and Italy, are located in France.
The nugget now hopes to increase its commercial efforts across the Rhine and in the Italian boot to also become the reference there for practitioners and patients. Even if it means staying a little more in the red: Doctolib is still not profitable, but its CEO hopes to become so for “2024 or 2025”. Which will not be easy because “every euro we have, we reinvest it“, he assures, listing the ongoing developments of software for doctors, nurses and liberal physiotherapists, but also for hospitals, which must all be completed this year. Not to mention other projects of “secure instant messaging“, exchange of medical documents and electronic prescription, but a priori no new acquisition planned on or outside its three current markets.
French investors (finally)
In its press release, the unicorn emphasizes the French nationality of its investors: Eurazeo and Bpifrance, already present in the capital since 2017, and who remain, according to Stanislas Niox-Chateau, “the main shareholders of Doctolib behind its managers and employees“.
What to forget the misadventure of its previous fundraising? In March 2019, Doctolib had appealed to an American fund, General Atlantic, known to have accompanied Alibaba or Airbnb, to finance its expansion.
Since then, the e-health startup, an area where personal data is particularly sensitive, has regularly come under fire for its dependence on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which hosts its cloud infrastructure. A choice that the startup, also entangled in a scandal over the management of its data in Germanyjustified for practical reasons: no French host could meet her needs at the time, she said.