Reimbursement Infrastructure Fueled Kry Growth
Johannes Schildt & Claes Ruth, CEO and CFO of Kry, on the AI future of telehealth
Getting telehealth reimbursed by the public system was the real product launch, because it turned Kry from a paid convenience app into infrastructure that ordinary patients could use at the same price as a normal doctor visit. In Europe, the biggest customer is usually the state or regional health service, not the patient. Once that payment rail existed, Kry could stop relying on out of pocket demand and start scaling through public contracts, local integrations, and clinician supply.
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Early on, Kry copied public system prices as a private provider to prove the service worked. The hard part was then convincing public payers to create a billing path for video visits, in markets where remote prescribing and remote care were not yet recognized in the rules.
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That reimbursement work became a moat. Kry describes Europe as commercially scalable on the technology side, but locally complex on contracts, prescriptions, patient data, and payer rules. That helps explain why few telehealth companies reached meaningful scale outside their home market.
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The contrast with Doctolib and Lifen shows what was distinctive. Doctolib mainly sells software to providers, and Lifen moves medical data between systems. Kry went deeper by getting paid to actually deliver care, which is harder to set up but exposes a much larger healthcare budget.
The next phase is moving from reimbursement for single video visits toward broader subscription and capitation models, where public systems pay for keeping populations served efficiently. That favors companies like Kry that already have contracts, clinicians, and digital to physical care pathways in place, and can layer AI on top of an existing payment and delivery backbone.