Vikram Bhaskaran was leading creator partnerships at Pinterest when his father started showing early symptoms of ALS, a rare, terminal neurodegenerative disease.
“It turned my world upside down,” Bhaskaran said. He worked during the day and spent his evenings googling the illness and treatment options and in Facebook groups. But Bhaskaran discovered that finding clear, helpful information about his father’s condition was incredibly difficult.
“I was sitting in Silicon Valley surrounded by some of the brightest minds in engineering and design,” he said. “But when it came to health, I felt it was like the dark ages.”
So, during the pandemic, Bhaskaran linked up with his two friends, Rohan Ramakrishna, a neurosurgeon at Weill Cornell Medicine, and Pinterest engineer Arun Ranganathan, to build Roon, an online resource that provides clinically accurate complex medical information created by doctors and people living with a specific disease.
Roon is aiming to replace googling (commonly called Dr. Google) and legacy healthcare content sites like WebMD and Healthline, with video-based Q&As on thousands of health issues created by doctors in top medical institutions.
Dr. Ramakrishna noticed that he and other physicians often answer the same set of questions when they are seeing patients. Yet, these answers are provided only during the doctor’s appointment.
“Doctors own in their brains billions of bits of privileged information that they share with you in the clinic, but it doesn’t really scale outside of their own medical practice,” Dr. Ramakrishna said.
Roon has invited thousands of doctors to share that information on its platform. Anyone looking for answers about a condition can access Roon and watch over 16,000 short videos about ALS, glioblastoma, dementia, polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), and fertility and family building. In the coming months, Roon plans to expand its coverage to women’s health (menopause, breast cancer, cervical cancer, and basic gynecological health), and will later expand its content to include pediatrics, cancer, neurology, and metabolic health.
Bhaskaran sees Roon as a creator platform for doctors. “It’s a little bit like early days of Pinterest,” he said.
Doctors join Roon because they want to provide valuable information and share their knowledge. The company’s platform gives them an opportunity to be creators, but not necessarily make money from their content.
Roon offers doctors an honorarium for participating, although some refuse it due to conflict of interest regulations, so this is not a platform that will attempt to turn doctors into well-paid social media star creators, Bhaskaran said.
However, Bhaskaran believes that doctors find that Roon helps them save time and deliver better patient care. They can, for instance, share Roon videos as a pre-appointment or post-appointment educational supplement.
The draw of Roon’s content for patients is that they hear medical advice from real doctors and other patients also dealing with the disease.
Although the company has not yet begun generating revenue, nor figured out its business model, investors have faith. The startup has raised $15 million at a valuation of $68 million co-led by Forerunner Ventures and FirstMark, and joined by previous investors Sequoia Capital and TMV.
Eurie Kim, managing partner at Forerunner, resonated deeply with Roon’s offering. She spent over a decade caregiving for her mom who had cancer.
“You don’t have a lot of time with your surgeon or your doctor, and so when they say, ‘Do you have any questions for me?’ you panic,” she said. Kim sees Roon as a way to empower patients to be more knowledgeable and prepared for appointments.
As for how Roon will monetize its content, Kim believes Roon can take several routes. It could sell ads, or offer a subscription service for hospitals and medical practices wanting to share educational videos with patients. The site could also potentially be expanded into a doctor directory that would help patients find doctors, or second opinions, she said.
As a consumer-focused investor, Kim believes that business models become clear once a platform has attracted a critical mass of loyal followers and users.
“You got to start with the content, you got to start with the trust, the right information, and then grow from there,” Kim said.
