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Shares in Dialogue Health Technologies surged on their first day on the Toronto Stock Exchange, trading well above their IPO price of $12, which secured total gross proceeds of about $100 million. It underscores the Montreal-based telemedicine startup’s rise, as well as the suddenly important role the sector plays in these COVID-19-addled times. The Logic spoke with Dialogue CEO Cherif Habib about the company, its Montreal roots, and whether it can sustain its meteoric growth.

You started in 2016 and your $12-million Series A raise was in 2018, all before telemedicine was a household name—in North America, anyway. What growth potential did you see?

I’m glad that you pointed that out that we were there at the beginning. We knew that there was a huge opportunity to use technology to improve how health care is delivered and consumed in our country. And at the same time, we saw that employers were looking for ways to attract and retain talent, improve productivity, reduce absenteeism and just take care of their employees’ health. 

It’s an interesting field, because access to health care is what you might call a high-anxiety activity. Fifty-seven per cent of Canadians can’t access care within a day. Telemedicine has almost brought to medicine what Uber did to the taxi network.

We actually really don’t like that characterization. When you take an Uber, it doesn’t really matter who the driver is, as long as you’re getting from A to B. And if you don’t like the guy or the gal, you give them one star and you never think about them again. Health care is a little bit different. It’s not transactional—you want to build relationships; you want to see the same team or the same people over and over again. And that’s really how we’ve operated. We really wanted to have this multidisciplinary clinic in the cloud, where every interaction with a patient was full of care and empathy.

Looking at the sector in general, a lot of the investment was pre-COVID, yet a lot of the growth was during COVID. In the case of Dialogue, how much of that growth is sustainable once things get back to normal, as it were?

It’s a fair question; I’ll make a couple of points. The first one is that we’ve doubled or tripled in revenue every single year we’ve been in existence. So while 2020 was undoubtedly a great year for Dialogue, it was not an outlier from a growth point of view. This was not the proverbial COVID bump. The second thing I would say is that nobody loves to go to the clinic, wait in line or sit in a waiting room. So I think it’s a little bit different from Zoom fatigue, because people actually do like to see their colleagues and hang out and go for coffee.

So you think your growth is sustainable? 

Absolutely. We’re seeing it in our retention numbers. Once people use the app, they continue using it and … as the pandemic has kind of ebbed and flowed and as restrictions are being eased, we don’t see any reduction and utilization or slowdown in growth. We’ve had virtually no churn.

You’ve stayed in Montreal, and as a very cynical Montrealer, I have to ask—why? What is it about the city that made you want to stay here, and what will keep you here in the future?

I’m really proud to be a Montrealer, Quebecer and Canadian, and what we’ve built here in Montreal is very special. The culture, the bilingualism and the tech environment here is just fantastic. And the AI sector here has allowed us to do something that you can’t do anywhere else in the world.