Docokids

Docokids is a Bogotá-based digital health service that lets parents and caregivers send questions about their children's health to licensed pediatricians through WhatsApp and receive a written assessment and plan in under 30 minutes, without appointments, queues or app downloads. The service operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, covers patients from 0 to 18 years old, and states that every reply is written by a practicing pediatrician rather than a bot. The clinical team consists of pediatricians trained at Colombian institutions such as Universidad Militar Nueva Granada, Universidad del Rosario and Universidad de los Andes, with experience in outpatient, emergency and pediatric intensive care settings, and pediatricians distributed across different regions of Colombia for cultural and linguistic coverage.

Beyond one-to-one consultations, Docokids publishes pediatrician-written articles on topics such as infant feeding, fever and vaccination, and runs paid virtual workshops and talks (Talleres and Charlas Docokids) on subjects including pediatric first aid, newborn care, prevention of child abuse and respiratory-season illness, sold both to parents and to corporate buyers. The company also sells to organizations: employer benefit plans that give staff pediatric access for their children, and plans for schools and daycare centers, alongside partnership channels for hospitals, vouchers (bonos) and allied pediatricians.

With backing from the UNICEF Venture Fund, Docokids is building an AI model for fever management intended to handle frequent fever-related caregiver questions autonomously while routing complex cases to pediatricians, with planned work on conversation summarization, symptom-pattern detection to flag high-risk cases, aggregate public-health insights, and translation/adaptation of responses to different linguistic and cultural contexts. The system is designed for low data usage and is planned to be open sourced.

Founding story

Co-founders Valentina Ríos and Natalia Cano, both pediatricians, observed gaps in pediatric healthcare access while working with families in underserved communities and built Docokids to deliver expert pediatric guidance regardless of location. The service began as a simple website with an onsite chat before moving to WhatsApp-based delivery. Natalia Cano serves as CEO and co-founder.

Business model

Docokids sells consumer plans for WhatsApp-based pediatric guidance: a one-off 6-hour trial at MXN 99, a 24-hour single-child plan at MXN 269, a monthly membership at MXN 349 covering all of a family's children with one authorized WhatsApp number, and a six-month membership at MXN 1,829 with two authorized numbers; memberships renew automatically and additional WhatsApp numbers can be added for an extra fee. It also sells gift plans and vouchers, paid workshops and talks, and organizational plans for employers, schools and daycare centers. The UNICEF Venture Fund lists the company as revenue-generating.

Subscription memberships and one-time time-boxed access passes purchased by families, plus workshop and talk fees and B2B plans for companies, schools and daycares; gift plans and redeemable vouchers are additional purchase routes.

Traction

The website states that more than 27,500 families use the service. As of March 2025 the company reported handling between 7,000 and 8,000 conversations per month, with 81% of conversations from users in Colombia and the remainder from other countries. A third-party profile reports over 350,000 pediatric inquiries answered since launch in 2022. Workshop pages report 1,058 participants in the newborn-care workshop and 434 in the children's first-aid course.

Latest developments

In March 2025 Docokids described its UNICEF Venture Fund-supported plan to enhance AI triage accuracy and response times, build a pediatric health insights dashboard for governments and NGOs, expand access to Chocó, La Guajira, Amazonas and Vaupés, and optimize WhatsApp and AI integrations. In its first 100 days it hired AI engineer Alejandro Gómez and, in early March 2025, visited the indigenous communities of Cabritos, Ciruelacat and Urrichicat in La Guajira with nonprofit partners Hilo Sagrado and Delzur. The site advertises a free virtual newborn-care workshop scheduled for 26 September 2026.