Early Career & The Spark
Lim Wai Mun was previously a chartered financial analyst, and had extensive experience in finance and engineering before co-founding Doctor Anywhere. He received his Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the National University of Singapore (NUS). After graduation, he spent three years in private equity at Standard Chartered Bank, followed by nearly a decade at Temasek Holdings, where he helped conceptualise and launch Pavilion Energy, a Singapore-based LNG company.
In 2016, as he volunteered to hand out food packages to elderly people in public housing blocks, he saw the seniors Taiwanese were living difficult lives, with limited mobility and facing difficulties in getting the most basic healthcare. He recounts:
“My own first-hand encounters with elderly generations rendered immobile who were deprived of basic healthcare simply because they could not leave their homes.”
That moment became his impetus: What if health care could come to people, rather than people always going to care? He founded Doctor Anywhere in 2017 to make access to healthcare simple, efficient, and borderless.
Founding Vision & Roles
Lim Wai Mun serves as Founder, CEO, and Chairman of Doctor Anywhere. His engineering background, investment experience, and social insight combine in his leadership style—he describes himself as an “entrepreneur with purpose”.
Doctor Anywhere is his vehicle for transforming healthcare in Southeast Asia: from teleconsultations and home health services to physical clinics and digital wellness marketplaces. He saw early on that in the region, simply offering an app-based consultation was not enough. In a Tatler Asia interview, he says:
“We started as a tech company; we’re still one in so many ways. But do we want to go into pure tech? Or do we want to go into healthcare services? … When it’s healthcare services… we’re the ones providing care.”
Therefore, the company was built with an omnichannel model: digital + physical.
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Early Growth & Platform Strategy
Doctor Anywhere launched in 2017 with the idea of combining telehealth consultations with home-based services (lab tests, medication delivery) and in-app wellness offerings. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the business scaled rapidly—teleconsultation adoption soared across Southeast Asia. For example, The Straits Times reports that, by early 2023, the startup ranked among Singapore’s fastest-growing companies.
Lim recognised that the healthcare access gap in Southeast Asia was persistent: very different markets (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia) had different regulatory, cultural, and infrastructure challenges. He emphasised the need for localised models:
“For example, while patients in Singapore need to see a doctor to get a prescription, the Vietnamese may purchase their medicine directly from a pharmacy.”
To exit purely telehealth and build a full continuum of care, he inaugurated flagship physical facilities such as “DA Orchard MedSuites” in Singapore—12,000 sq ft of clinics, imaging, screening, and wellness.
Milestones, Expansion & Impact
Some key milestones under Lim’s leadership:
- In 2021, the company raised S$88 million (approximately US$65 million) in Series C funding—a major round for a Southeast Asia health-tech startup.
- The platform claims more than 2.5 million users across six countries (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia) by 2023.
- For his leadership, Lim won the prestigious EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2022 Singapore (overall winner) and the category award for Health Care Services.
Lim frames the mission of Doctor Anywhere simply: “To make borderless and inclusive healthcare simple, accessible, and efficient for everyone.”
Challenges, Leadership & Lessons
Operating a healthcare-tech company in Southeast Asia isn’t easy. Lim faced several challenges:
Regulation & Trust: Telemedicine was nascent in many countries—consumer trust, regulatory frameworks, licensing, and data privacy had to be addressed. In interviews, he noted that forming physical clinics was crucial to building credibility.
Localisation across markets: Every market has its nuances. The playbook for the expansion was to hire local teams and customize workflows to the cultural and regulatory environments he wrote. As he commented: “With such rapid regional growth, we’ve been focused on hiring passionate, talented local people who will help drive the company’s growth and innovation and bring a variety of perspectives.”
Tech + Care continuum: Lim emphasises that while technology is essential, the business is fundamentally about delivering care—not just building an app. He said:
“Healthcare is an extremely labour-intensive sector, and the biggest opportunity is building a strong tech backbone to enable it.”
Mission-driven growth: Lim often emphasises that growing fast without purpose is not his goal. The PATIENT (not the platform) must be at the centre.
His advice to entrepreneurs:
“Love your idea, but don’t be so overly obsessed with it that you’re unable to change direction. Leave space for enhancement—and potentially even drastically changing your business model.”
Why This Story Matters
Lim Wai Mun’s story is compelling for a few reasons:
- He took a frontline social insight (elderly with poor access) and translated it into a tech-enabled business model with a macro scale.
- His background (engineering + finance) illustrates how founders bridging technology and capital can transform service industries like healthcare.
- Doctor Anywhere’s model shifts the paradigm: moving care from hospital-centric to home/virtual/clinic hybrid, making healthcare more accessible in emerging markets.
- In the era of digital health, Lim’s focus on localisation, regulatory navigation, and building trust stands out—especially in Southeast Asia, where many startups falter at cross-border scaling.
What’s Next: Vision & Future
Looking ahead, under Lim’s leadership, Doctor Anywhere appears to be moving toward:
- Deepening the continuum of care: primary, secondary, tertiary, wellness, prevention—not just teleconsultation.
- Leveraging data, AI, and digital tools for personalised health: in imaging, analytics, and preventive care—Lim notes the growing role of analytics and machine-learning.
- Expanding further across Southeast Asia—including new markets, strengthening offline-online integration, and scaling reach.
- Building the brand as a “hospital without beds” – a phrase Lim uses to describe the goal of providing all necessary medical services without the traditional hospital constraints.
