The co-founder and CEO of Kismet has declared that the Melbourne-founded healthcare startup is ready to get back to work and continue to pave the way to achieve its vision of making healthcare more accessible, after securing a seed funding round of $12.5 million.
Just 12 months after launching, Kismet CEO Mark Woodland said the startup was humbled and grateful for the new $12.5 million capital from its latest funding round, which was led by global consumer internet group Prosus Ventures and venture capital firm Airtree Ventures.
The fully remote healthcare app and digital community platform was founded by Woodland, who also previously founded Xplor, along with co-founders Stefan Cordiner, Lauren Grimes, Sam Armstrong and Mathew Ellis in February 2023.
After wrapping up this funding round, as well as securing $4 million in a pre-seed round last year led by Airtree Ventures and venture capital firms Black Nova and Flying Fox, Kismet’s total financing now stands at $16.5 million.
Woodland told SmartCompany Kismet removes all the admin burden that exists around caring for someone and replaces it with technology, so people can spend more time focusing on the ones they care about.
“We’ve got a rapidly aging population and a declining birth rate,” Woodland says.
“What happens when you have an aging population, like the baby boomer generation, is you have a sandwich generation that gets stuck in the middle.
“The sandwich generation is people that have to care for their aging parents and their own children.”
Woodland says the platform is focused on making sure people aren’t on long waitlists for specialist services.
“There’s horror stories of people having to wait six to 12 months for in-demand services like speech therapy and occupational therapy,” he says.
“They’re the types of services that you can’t really wait that long for because they’re pretty critical in terms of development and outcome.
“So we are searching everywhere for live availability, so we can get people seen faster, and then we’re getting the health care providers paid faster. So they don’t have to wait six weeks for payments from the government, they get it instantly, which means they can provide more services and it’s easier to enter the NDIS.”
Woodland says the stories the Kismet team hears are often heartbreaking.
“I spoke to a mother the other day. She’s a single mother, she was struggling to manage work, plus feeling super guilty by coming home and not being able to support her child who needed some disability services.
“So she uses Kismet and all of that admin is taken away, which is the true intent of the platform.
“She gets to spend time with her child, which we think is so much better than sitting on Google, making phone calls, and feeling guilty at the end of the night.”
Kismet makes disability and healthcare services, including the NDIS, more accessible by allowing its more than 100,000 users, which includes over 35,000 providers and support coordinators, to automatically create a shortlist of verified service providers within 48 hours.
Woodland says the funding is solely being used to grow Kismet.
“It’s not being used to scale things or anything. It’s being used to grow our consumer base in the marketplace more, attending more events, supporting those with a disability and advocating for them as we start expanding beyond the Australian shore,” he explains.
“Accelerating our go-to market allows us to get more awareness for consumers about the product.”
As well as awareness campaigns about what Kismet is, what it does and how it can help, Woodland adds that Kismet platform’s technology will constantly improve the further the startup goes down the automation path of admin.
“You have things like AI and Quicky. So technology is getting better and better at predicting the outcome that someone wants to achieve for their own personal health journey,” Woodland says.
“In finding those available spots, we save a significant amount of time for someone that might be caring for a child or an elderly parent who spends most of their time on Google, searching, phone calling and seeing if anyone’s got availability.
“AI technology solves that, so the tech will constantly improve and that has been a natural thing that occurs in a startup.”
While many startups that take on external funding do so to hire more staff, Woodland says Kismet wants to keep its team super small.
“We’re not basing our growth on how big our team is, which you hear quite a bit,” he says.
“We’re basing our growth based on our performance. Small groups of people doing really, really cool things,” he says.
That group of people currently includes 16 staff members.
“It’s not that traditional answer where we’re using the funding to grow the team because we’re actually trying to do the opposite,” says Woodland.
“We’re trying to hire superstars.”
When asked by SmartCompany about the international markets Kismet wanted to dominate, Woodland says there are plenty of markets out there providing opportunities for the startup.
“If you think about the fastest aging populations in the world, there’s places like Japan that I would argue probably needs a lot of support and then there’s probably more local markets like Singapore and Malaysia that are of interest,” he says.
“There’s European markets like Germany that have very similar systems to Australia. But the need for Kismet’s platform is universal, says Woodland.
“I think ultimately for us, every person on the planet is aging – unless you guys have seen a startup that’s solving that everyone is aging – and this is a problem that’s going to face every single person,” he says.
“At some point, you’re going to have to care for someone else. Any market right now is a real opportunity for us.”
