An Uber Eats and Rappi veteran has brought her on-demand know-how to an even more pressing challenge: the very condition of being an inundated patient in Latin America, a region with some of the worst health outcomes in the world.
Leona Health, the telehealth startup founded by former Uber Eats LatAm general manager and Rappi COO Caroline Merin, has closed a $14 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from General Catalyst as well as Accel’s early-stage investment arm Checks Lab — not to mention individual angels such as Maven Clinic’s Kate Ryder and Nubank’s David Vélez and Rappi’s Simón Borrero.
Why WhatsApp Has Become a Growing Threat to Health Care’s Privacy
Throughout Latin America, WhatsApp isn’t social skubalon — it’s how business is done.
In fact, it is even higher than 90 percent in some markets, as reported by DataReportal and GSMA Intelligence, and healthcare has not lagged behind. Patients commonly come to expect their doctor to be available for anything from urgent symptoms to school notes and receipts. The effect is an always-on inbox that contorts the lines between triage, admin and personal time.
In the U.S., portals associated with systems like Epic often act as intermediaries for patient communication, but physician practices in Latin America are much more fragmented and less digital. The Inter-American Development Bank and OECD have frequently emphasized an uneven penetration of electronic medical record systems, and little interoperability throughout the region. That leaves clinicians handling sensitive medical questions in the same app they use for family chit-chat, and there’s no audit trail or any way to categorize and prioritize inquiries or delegate them.
An AI Copilot With Clinical Messaging in Mind
Leona reaches doctors on their patients’ existing path. Patients continue to use WhatsApp; doctors can see and respond to those messages via Leona’s mobile app. The system sorts and schedules lines of communication according to priority, proposes draft responses to populate the queue, then funnels mundane chores (follow-ups, paperwork, payment confirmations) off to the staff or on-call teammates. Early users say they gain back an extra two to three hours a day by slicing the after-hours inbox churn and zeroing in on clinical priorities.
The company says it will soon release a Conversational Scheduled Autonomous agent for mundane information gathering and basic intake, the sort of low-complexity, high-volume work that can readily be automated so long as it has strong guardrails. That matters: Pan American Health Organization research ties administrative overload and off-hours demands to worsening clinician burnout, a wrench in the region’s access- and quality-improvement plans.
Backers Bet On Consumer-Grade UX For Clinics
Investors appear to be betting on a consumer-grade operating layer for small and midsize practices. The reasoning is simple: people already select their doctors based on their willingness to respond over WhatsApp, while doctors don’t have a workflow tool for meeting that expectation at scale. Leona’s proposition is to apply the prioritization, automation and delegation that have become standard fare in logistics and on-demand delivery — spaces where Merin spent close to a decade — across healthcare communications.
In addition, the seed round was led by Andreessen Horowitz with General Catalyst and Accel being joined by experienced health tech and fintech operators as angels. That combination underscores the dual challenge: clinical safety and compliance on one hand, and consumer-grade reliability and payments-adjacent workflows on the other. Leona says it can now tap doctors across 22 specialties in 14 countries, a nod to the broader region’s cross-border care patterns as well as WhatsApp being omnipresent as a front door.
Privacy, Safety And The Regulatory Puzzle
Transforming ad hoc WhatsApp threads into formal clinical workflows raises thorny questions around privacy and safety. Other data-protection regimes, like the LGPD and sectoral health privacy rules, are enforced in countries such as Brazil, Mexico and Colombia. Any tooling that wraps around WhatsApp must solve for consent, auditability, retention policies and role-based access — features not baked into chat as a service.
AI assistance adds another layer. To build trust with clinicians, draft responses require medical context, transparency and a lightweight review loop to guard against hallucinations or scope creep. The leading digital health systems in Europe and the U.S. have demonstrated that message triage and scheduling is one of the low-risk, high-impact automation zones with guardrails and clear escalation paths. With Leona’s design — surfacing urgency, templatizing responses and enabling delegation — the company is incorporating these best practices.
Go-To-Market and Expansion Outlook for Leona Health
Leona’s team of 13 is divided between Mexico City and Silicon Valley, a talent strategy that marries proximity to clinicians with access to AI engineering. The low-hanging fruit is Latin America, where WhatsApp-based care is both popular and culturally mandated. There is a similar dynamic in parts of Europe and the Middle East, as well as in Asia where direct messaging between patients and doctors is allowed and widely used.
Next for the company: expand to cover new specialties, ship autonomous scheduling and intake, and prove return on investment by measuring time saved and clinical outcomes. If Leona can successfully sort the signal from the noise, document interactions and funnel the work at hand to the right hands at the right time, it could then be anointed the de facto inbox for ambulatory clinics across the region — cleaning up a channel that excelled at ubiquity but not on purpose.
