TechCrunch Sept 26
A spot of consolidation in the Russian online health services space today. Health advice portal VitaPortal, which raised a $2 million Series A last October from Prostor Capital and Esther Dyson, has merged with ZdorovieOnline.ru, a smaller medical platform and electronic medical records portal, backed by Runa Capital.
The pair said they are hoping to create the single largest entity in Russian’s online health services space. Currently VitaPortal has more than 700,000 registered users of its health services but they said investor forecasts factoring in the merger suggest they can increase this figure to 5 million users next year.
Azamat Ulbashev, VitaPortal’s CEO and CoFounder, told TechCrunch the two main reasons for the merger are “technology acquisitions and acqui-hire”.
“After the merger, only VitaPortal.ru will remain; ZdorovieOnline.ru will be closed,” he said via email. “Their great technology for storing medical data will be implemented into VitaPortal platform. All our services (weight loss management, diabetes control, fitness and Q&A) will use their technology.”
According to Ulbashev, VitaPortal’s main competitors are now: “health.mail.ru (10M unique users per month, Mail.ru Group), medkrug.ru (2M unique users, Q&A platform) medportal.ru and others.”
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Russian Health Advice Site VitaPortal Merges With Local Medical Platform ZdorovieOnline
