HD rents idle surgery rooms in Southeast Asia at 15–20% below market

HD runs a marketplace for outpatient healthcare in Southeast Asia — think an Amazon of health services — and launched HDcare, a private-label surgery service, on top of it.

$6M round from Partech Partners, M Venture Partners, AC Ventures, iSeed and Orvel Ventures; also accepted into Google for Startups Accelerator Southeast Asia.

Sheji Ho, previously co-founder of e-commerce enabler aCommerce, noticed Thai surgeons advertising for private customers on Facebook. In a region where 40% of health spending is out of pocket (WHO, 2018) and patients go straight to hospitals with long queues, doctors 'are kind of like merchants who operate across different platforms', he said. HD launched around 2019 and built an outpatient marketplace the hard way — hand-holding hospitals onto the platform, which Ho calls its moat because 'SaaS is still too early for Southeast Asia'.

When COVID wiped out Thailand's medical tourists, operating rooms sat empty — 'organically, hospitals wanted to use our platforms', Ho said. Two months before the TechCrunch report, HD launched HDcare: private-label surgeries (thyroid, hemorrhoid, orthopedic) booked through the marketplace at 15–20% below market, with HD bargaining down room rates. The service started with 20+ operating rooms across Thailand and Indonesia, 40+ surgery types lined up, and a target of 200 surgeries per quarter by Q4 2023. HD monetizes via transaction cuts, listing fees and provider marketing products, Amazon Ads-style, and puts patients first on disputes in subjective categories like beauty.

The sharing-economy math needs idle assets and unmet demand in one place — pandemic-idled ORs and price-blind patients were both already there.

HD's boring early work onboarding hospitals became the moat: in a market where SaaS adoption is premature, hand-held supply is defensible.

Ho's recession thesis drove timing: Groupon scaled on idle restaurants and Airbnb on vacant homes — empty surgery rooms were the same trade.

Recessions reward matching engines: excess supply is the raw material, and the startup that aggregates it can set prices both sides accept.

As of January 2, 2023, HD was pushing HDcare toward 200 surgeries per quarter by Q4 2023, targeting 2–3x annual growth post-COVID, freshly funded at $6M with access to deeper supply from its 1,500-provider network.