Telehealth start-up Coviu grew more than 6000pc during Covid, now expanding to the US

Originally founded as a CSIRO spin-out, Coviu is now expanding to the US and is doubling its headcount in the next 12 months.

One of the pandemic’s strongest success stories, telehealth platform Coviu, is expanding to the US ahead of a broader global expansion, after usage of its platform grew 6250 per cent since the start of Covid-19, delivering more than 7 million consultations.

The company, a spin-out of CSIRO and led by CEO and founder Silvia Pfeiffer, has grown its team fivefold over the past two years to 50 people, and Dr Pfeiffer said the company was now Australia’s largest all-in-one virtual care platform. Its offering has grown from telehealth to include video conferencing, an apps marketplace, remote patient monitoring and new unified video and phone helpline software and group therapy consultations.

She said the telehealth market was projected to grow to $14bn by 2030, and that as a built-for-purpose platform, Coviu has a number of advantages over standard business and consumer communication tools such as Zoom and Google Meet, especially when it comes to clinical workflows and use cases.

“At the start of Covid-19 we experienced the type of adoption in weeks that would have taken years in normal times,” Dr Pfeiffer said. “At the height of lockdowns we did 25,000 consultations a day, and since January this year things have become a bit more predictable. The government has made Medicare telehealth items permanent, which has been a really important development, and a lot of large organisations are realising they have to embrace telehealth and offer it as an option.

“Telehealth has now become part of the general framework of what we expect in healthcare.”

Coviu is aiming to double its headcount in the next 12 months and as part of its expansion efforts in to the US has tapped former AthenaHealth and TigerConnect executive Kirk Paul Kirkman to serve as chief commercial officer and president of Coviu Corporation.

Dr Pfieffer was recently named one of The Australian’s Top 100 Innovators.

“Once we have success in the US we will probably look towards Europe … The UK could be an interesting market. And Asia of course could be an interesting market but has quite a different approach to healthcare,” Dr Pfieffer said. “We will always need someone on the ground to give us an understanding of the legal environment and channels in the countries because it’s not like setting up a consumer platform or something like Canva that every organisation will use.”

She did not disclose Coviu’s current valuation but said the start-up has enough funding for about two years’ worth of runway, and will likely raise capital at the beginning of 2023, probably from US investors.

In Australia, the start-up has partnered with the CSIRO and The University of Sydney, among others, to lead the creation of an AI-enabled digital toolkit to transform wound care. It also provided the software for a virtual training program to improve end of life conversations and help families make more informed decisions about organ and tissue donation.

“We need to better dealing with the current Covid outbreak,” Dr Pfeiffer said. “There’s a hospital in Victoria, The Northern Hospital, which has introduced a virtual hospital emergency room approach, and they have used our platform to massively reduce the number of people that come to the emergency room.

“Virtual care can really address some of the key challenges that we have in healthcare and we need to be open to that.”