Chatbots have come a great distance. For years, they were limited to responding with predetermined replies that followed an easy logic structure. But customers can have complex problems, and no tree-diagram of possible replies can have enough branches to account for all the sting cases that arise. Thankfully, the appearance of huge language models has finally rendered chatbots useful. Armed with mountains of information, startups at the moment are leveraging generative AI to create custom chatbots for all styles of businesses and use cases, particularly those where people need to be certain about what they’re buying.
Thailand’s HD is constructing chatbots geared toward one such industry: healthcare. The corporate began as a marketplace for third-party healthcare and surgery services, and sees a powerful case for developing conversational AI for the healthcare customer journey.
“The products we’re selling are usually not the standard stuff you purchase on Amazon. They’re hospital services, so people shop the identical way as they do offline,” co-founder Sheji Ho told TechCrunch.
- Though each product has an outline on HD’s marketplace HD Mall, Ho says people still prefer to ask first. “90% of the chat messages are people asking about product information. The chat commerce process [is similar to] the offline experience,” he explained.
To advance its AI ambitions, HD recently raised a $5.6 million Series A round led by SBI Ven Capital, a subsidiary of the Japanese financial giant SBI Group, through its joint fund with Kyobo Securities from South Korea and NTU Singapore’s NTUitive. M Enterprise Partners, FEBE Ventures, Partech Partners, Ratio Ventures, Orvel Ventures, and TA Ventures also participated within the round.
AI for Southeast Asia
Ho says HD is working on constructing the “Sierra AI of the Southeast Asian healthcare industry.”
Over five years, Ho and his team saw that the faster HD’s representatives responded to inquiries, the upper the conversion rate. “So there’s a superb case to make use of AI to automate that process,” he said. The corporate not only expects conversational AI to assist cut costs, it is going to allow staff to concentrate on higher-value tasks, like answering more complex customer questions.
But Ho and his team appear to have a sensible view of what they’ll achieve. It’ll not have the option to match U.S. firms which have “nearly limitless access” to powerful GPUs, talent and enterprise capital, so the corporate is specializing in constructing vertical AI, with local data being its moat.
“Emerging markets must compete and benefit from AI through the use of the info they’ve — proprietary data that no one else has,” said Ho. “We see that occuring in different places, too. Some call this vertical AI, where they use a vertical domain — specific data that’s proprietary to a certain business or industry. Then they construct on top of that, they usually enhance the model to the purpose where they’ve an AI application that’s practical they usually can start monetizing.”
HD due to this fact plans to coach chatbots with the ocean of anonymized transaction, chat, FAQ, and product catalog data it has accrued over time. Currently, 30% to 40% of the corporate’s transactions are done through chat commerce with customer support employees.
HD is planning to make use of the brand new capital to roll out a chatbot for its marketplace inside 3 months, and open up the technology for third-party use by the top of this 12 months. Potential customers are hospitals and clinics that need 24/7 customer support. The startup has already worked with some 2,000 healthcare providers in Asia, which is able to enable it to fine-tune its base language model for the healthcare domain. Eventually, the chatbot service will give the corporate a brand new SaaS revenue stream along with its marketplace commissions.
Fundraising post-pandemic
Like many other startups, HD cut costs and aimed for sustainable growth in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. The corporate “didn’t necessarily need to lift,” because it was heading towards profitability on 2x year-on-year growth after the pandemic was over, but Ho also saw a possibility to maneuver faster when others were slowing down.
“You hear people saying ‘It’s best to raise money once you don’t must raise.’ If we raise now then all the things else can be cheaper. For instance, customer acquisition is cheaper because everyone else stopped promoting in a recession. Talent acquisition also [costs less] because firms are unfortunately shedding people.”
Globally, startup valuations have been on a decline for the previous few years. HD hasn’t escaped that wave, but Ho says he recognized the good thing about accepting a more moderate valuation early on.
“I believe it’s pointless for firms to fret about valuation at such an early stage. We’ve seen that over the past few years, especially 2021, when firms began the race at such high valuations,” he said, pointing for instance to Indian health tech unicorn, Prystn, which lost half of its valuation after a period of frenetic growth.
“Because they raised at such a high valuation, they were forced to grow super aggressively, and that results in founders and firms cutting corners. You may’t cut corners once you’re in healthcare and also you’re coping with people’s lives,” Ho said.
