Kry Stops Defensive Spending After Consolidation
Johannes Schildt & Claes Ruth, CEO and CFO of Kry, on the AI future of telehealth
The competitive map flipped from land grab to consolidation, which let Kry stop spending like a startup under siege and start behaving like scaled healthcare infrastructure. During COVID, dozens of telehealth companies raised fast money and chased the same patients, clinicians, and payer contracts. Once capital tightened and many subscale players cut back, shut down, or lost relevance, Kry could lean on its existing doctor network, payer relationships, and country-by-country operating footprint instead of outspending new entrants.
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Kry had real reasons to spend defensively. It had built a large clinical operation, with 1,300 plus doctors and nurses by 2023, while facing regional challengers like Doctolib in France, Ada in Germany, Babylon in the UK, and DocPlanner in Poland. In that phase, growth spend was partly about keeping contracts and patient demand from fragmenting.
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What changed was not that telehealth got easy, but that weaker competitors stopped being credible long term partners. Post COVID public markets punished telehealth sharply, smaller privates consolidated or cut back, and Babylon's US clinical services were later wound down. That made size, balance sheet discipline, and proven delivery more valuable to public systems and health plans.
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Kry also competes on a different basis than pure booking or video tools. It makes money from actual care delivery, payer contracts, software sold to providers, and referrals to labs and pharmacies. That broader model matters because a payer choosing a partner is buying staffed care capacity and operational reliability, not just a video button in an app.
The next phase favors telehealth companies that look like durable care operators, with embedded payer contracts, clinician supply, and software that lowers cost per visit. As AI handles more intake and routine resolution, the winners are likely to be the scaled incumbents that already control demand, staffing, and reimbursement flows across multiple countries.