Eucalyptus: The power of vertically integrated telehealth

By Christina Fa and Nick Bunick | Jul 13, 2021

Over the last 18 months, we’ve witnessed a dramatic shift in the adoption of telemedicine and digital health services. Fueled by COVID-19, technological advances, and increased consumer demand for convenience, the digital health revolution is transforming healthcare worldwide. The data alone is staggering. In the United States, adoption of telehealth skyrocketed from 11% in 2019 to 46% during COVID, according to McKinsey (1). MyDoc, a telemedicine platform in Singapore, grew 272% from January 2019 to January 2021 (2), while Ping An Good Doctor in China saw new users increase nine-fold in just one month, between December 2019 and January 2020 (3). In Australia, 44% of primary care visits occurred via telemedicine in April 2020, compared with 0.1% just two months prior (4). By all indications, telehealth is not just a trend—it has made its mark and it is here to stay.

In light of this rapid transformation, NewView Capital (NVC) is excited to announce that we are leading Eucalyptus’ $30M Series B and will be joining their board. Eucalyptus is the largest vertically integrated telehealth platform in Australia, serving more than 200,000 patients across four digital health brands. Leveraging the foundation of their shared technology platform, Eucalyptus seeks to support people facing common health challenges via demographic- and condition-specific digital experiences.

Why condition-specific care matters

As consumers, we want hyper-personalized experiences and healthcare is no different. Digital health experiences focused on specific health challenges can be better customized to provide the care we’re seeking, offering more targeted insights and access to specialists with expertise in a given condition.

We’ve seen the amazing success of similar US-based demographic- and condition-specific digital health companies already, including:

Noom for weight loss
SWORD and Hinge Health for the treatment of musculoskeletal diseases
Livongo for disease management
23andMe (NVC portfolio company) for insight into health predispositions and carrier status
Hims & Hers (NVC portfolio company) for sexual and mental health, hair loss, and skin care

This personalized approach to care is core to Eucalyptus’ mission, with a relentless focus on delivering the best customer experience across all of their digital brands. Since its founding in 2019, Eucalyptus has launched four brands dedicated to contraception and fertility, skincare, men’s health and sexual wellness. And this is just the beginning. We believe that demographic and condition-specific healthcare is key to delivering behavioural health and chronic disease management, making Eucalyptus poised for exponential growth over the next few years.

A shared infrastructure and platform to drive efficient growth

As we analyze the many digital health products that exist today, we notice there are a number of similar back-office operations and integrations in common. These include access to high-quality healthcare providers, a central repository of patient data, remote monitoring tools, partnerships with pathology labs and pharmacies, a robust customer success model, and a brand and marketing team to create engaging content for user acquisition.

It is these foundational elements that set Eucalyptus apart as a fully vertically integrated telehealth platform. Over the past three years, Eucalyptus has built a shared platform that underpins the operations behind all of their brands, bringing together a highly efficient operational backend. This enables them to launch new brands and products with ease on top of a scalable infrastructure. New features that are launched within one brand can also be rapidly scaled across Eucalyptus' other brands. The result is a portfolio of digital health products that enable higher touch, higher quality relationships between doctors and patients, proactive chronic disease management, and comprehensive healthcare to help consumers make better health decisions and stay healthier longer. As Eucalyptus’ existing brands have expanded their service offering, we’ve seen explosive growth paired with strong customer retention and increasing AOV, indicating customers are expanding their usage of Eucalyptus over time.

With multiple brands and products under the Eucalyptus umbrella, the marketing team has also carefully refined their user acquisition strategy, testing different approaches in order to direct dollars to the most efficient channels, products, and brands across the entire portfolio. Through this, Eucalyptus has been able to maintain and even reduce customer acquisition costs over time, achieving strong metrics across LTV / CAC and payback compared to similar best-in-class consumer subscription businesses.

Building a world class team in Australia’s growing tech ecosystem

At its core, the rapid growth of Eucalyptus is fueled by its world-class team. During our conversations with co-founders, Tim, Benny, Alexey and Charlie, we were immediately impressed by their clarity of vision and execution prowess. Their ability to identify and hire top talent across their brands and operations has allowed them to build a team with alumni from Atlassian, BuzzFeed, Canva, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Morgan Stanley, Wieden + Kennedy, and more. The Australian tech ecosystem is nascent but rapidly expanding, with the explosion of Aussie tech unicorns such as Canva, Airwallex, Afterpay, and, of course, Atlassian. As a result, more and more individuals are leaving professional services to join high-growth tech companies like Eucalyptus.

We’re excited to see what ideas, brands, and markets the Eucalyptus team will incubate and launch next. With $15B (5) spent annually on type 2 diabetes and over $10B spent on both mental health (6) and cardiovascular treatments (7) in Australia, Eucalyptus has a massive opportunity to build the most comprehensive, demographic and condition-focused digital health portfolio in primary care, both in Australia and beyond.

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