Amid news yesterday that Russian billionaire Yuri Milner’s DST Global had poured $400 million into Twitter, another DST investment may have been easy to overlook. ZocDoc—a New York-based startup that allows patients in nine cities to book their doctors’ appointments online—scored a $50 million investment from DST. The Series C funding was a major coup, and brought in a new investor for ZocDoc, which previously raised $20 million from Khosla Ventures, the Founders Fund, SV Angel, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff.
ZocDoc’s website, which started in 2007 as a service in New York, allows patients to search for doctors by name, specialty, location, or insurance provider. Patients can then schedule appointments with a few clicks. With the new funding, ZocDoc plans to expand nationwide, says co-founder and CEO Cyrus Massoumi.
DST’s Milner is one of the most renowned investors in technology, with a portfolio that includes Groupon, Zynga, and Facebook. Massoumi says SV Angel’s Ron Conway introduced Milner to ZocDoc about a month ago, and the investment decision flowed from there. “Having one more great investor is a privilege,” Massoumi says. “Look at their portfolio. They represent the leading edge of the Internet.”
Massoumi was inspired to start ZocDoc after he suffered a busted eardrum on a plane flight in 2007, when he was working as a consultant for McKinsey & Co. He scoured his insurance company’s website and worked the phone, but it still took him four days to get an appointment. All this while
