Doctolib is the platform for connecting healthcare professionals and patients which has become essential. It was launched in 2013 by Stanislas Niox-Château and has established itself in the health landscape for several years since it has become one of the rare French unicorns. Focus on the journey of its founder, a graduate of HEC.
Stanislas Niox-Château: from professional tennis player to founder of Doctolib
Stanislas Niox-Château was born in Paris in 1987. He grew up in a family of teachers in Boulogne-Billancourt. Since his early childhood, Stanislas has been immersed in a world of high-level competition through tennis, which for a long time represented a large part of his life. Some members of his family are part of the French Tennis Federation. He was confronted with the best players of his generation (Gaël Monfils and Jérémy Chardy) and won, at the age of 12, the International Youth Open in his category.
Stanislas admits to being more hardworking than talented. “ In sport as in entrepreneurship, I was not necessarily the best, but I was extremely needy », he explains to the magazine Management. He trained much more than his teammates and had the ambition of entering the Top 100 best tennis players in the world. He was also selected by the French Tennis team and won the Paris championships six times.
The beginning of 2004 marked the end of his professional tennis career due to a serious back injury. It was with a heavy heart that he left his passion at 17 and took refuge in studies. He obtained a baccalaureate with honors and joined a preparatory class for the Grandes Écoles of Business in Saint-Louis. In 2006, he was admitted to HEC. Stanislas still has very good memories of his long years in sport and describes tennis as “ school of life “. He specifies during an interview with HEC : “there are extremely strong links between entrepreneurship and sport. First of all, in the work itself, we set goals and we work hard to achieve them, like athletes. Then in the way of constantly questioning yourself to improve. And finally because it’s a marathon, creating a company requires endurance and courage. »
Once his diploma in hand, Stanislas was recruited in 2010 by Otium Capital, an investment fund which allowed him to initially launch The Forkan online restaurant reservation platform since bought by TripAdvisor. The young entrepreneur has always had the ambition to launch a project useful to society, so the idea of Doctolib seemed obvious to him.
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Stanislas Niox-Château and Doctolib: The birth of a French unicorn
From the first weeks of Doctolib’s launch, Stanislas and his partner, Steve Abou Rjeily, toured medical practices to train providers in this new device revolutionizing the medical field. Steve Abou Rjeily explains to the site developpementeconomie.fr: “In 2013, we had the idea, we had the team, but we had to confirm that the project was viable and that the project was an expectation and a need of health professionals. We went to meet 500 healthcare professionals and assistants to understand how they worked, how we could improve their daily lives and how we could simplify their organization“. Stanislas was only 26 years old at the time, but was convinced of the usefulness of his idea. He does not hesitate to recall during an interview with The Parisian that “education and health have weak digital technologies and strong organizational problems”.
Doctolib is a service platform which aims to facilitate the management of doctors’ secretarial services. This involves making appointments, managing diaries and cancellations. Thanks to the platform, the number of unfulfilled appointments has fallen by 75% thanks to Doctolib. Professionals saved 30 to 50% of their time, by focusing their energy on tasks other than administrative ones.
Despite a rise in the power of competing platforms at the time of its launch, Doctolib remained the market leader. Stanislas Niox-Château specifies to Capital: “We have developed an offer aimed primarily at practitioners, while most companies have focused on the service provided to patients.”
The phenomenal success of Doctolib is impressive. In its first year of creation, the platform already had one million users. In just four years, the company has attracted 45,000 service providers, 1,000 healthcare establishments and 35 million users in France and Germany. The specificity of the site lies in the fact that it does not spend money on advertising. According to Stanislas Niox-Château, “the main thing is not to have a revolutionary idea, but to improve the daily lives of millions of people with simple tools, providing concrete solutions to daily problems.” he confides to Capital.
In 2019, Doctolib raised 150 million euros from BPI France and Eurazeo. Thanks to this, the company becomes a “unicorn”, that is to say a startup not listed on the stock exchange, but with a valuation of more than a billion dollars.
The health crisis: a real boon for Doctolib and Stanislas Niox-Château
The coronavirus crisis contributed to the success of the platform’s teleconsultation service launched at the start of 2019. They increased from around 1,500 to 100,000 consultations during the health crisis. Since the beginning of March 2020, 1,400,000 French people have carried out a video consultation on Doctolib. Steve Abou Rjeily, co-founder of the platform, does not fail to specify to développementeconomie: “We see that this is a use that will continue since the end of confinement, there are around 41,000 teleconsultations per day, so that is 30 times more than previously. I think that this is a practice that the French will adopt more and more and above all that practitioners will favor cases where face-to-face attendance in the medical office is not obligatory.”
During this very complicated period, Doctolib was extremely supportive of professionals and provided the teleconsultation service free of charge in France and Germany. Today, 33,000 professionals use this new device.
During the coronavirus crisis, and like other companies, Doctolib found itself obliged to restructure. The unicorn put a good portion of its employees into teleworking in just 24 hours. Steve Abou Rjeily proudly announces to développementeconomie: “Our teams did an incredible job! We managed to create a team of 1,400 entrepreneurs who took on this civic duty to be available to health professionals to help them reorganize and maintain health activity, so as not to cut the link between the population and the medical profession.”
Stanislas Niox-Château at the head of the biggest unicorn in France with Doctolib
Stanislas Niox-Château made headlines in March 2022 and for good reason! Indeed, the entrepreneur achieved the feat of leading a major fundraising for Doctolib, one of the largest in the history of French Tech, with other fundraising such as Contentsquare or Sorare.
Thanks to a 500 million euro funding round, Doctolib becomes the biggest unicorn in France. Indeed, Stanislas Niox-Château’s startup is now valued at $5.8 billion. With this money, the entrepreneur now wants to accelerate the development of this unicorn which is becoming a reference outside the borders of France. It intends to recruit no less than 3,500 new employees.
