Our Story - Kibo

We didn't start Kibo because we saw a market opportunity. We started it because I once sat exactly where you might be sitting now - staring at a healthcare system that had given me an answer I couldn't live with.

Hospital emergency room visit — I've never been the healthiest one in the room. Another incident where my cardiac condition flared up and I got sent to Toronto Western ER. If the condition is acutely critical, the healthcare system can catch it. If it is not acute but would still devastate your life, prepare to live with it for a long time until someone can intervene.

In 2023, my lower back gave out. Pain in my lower back and sacrum, then neuropathy. I didn't even have a GP at the time - I walked into a sports medicine clinic, and that walk-in doctor became my PCP by default. After bloodwork, X-rays, and check-up, he said the words I'd learn to hate: wait three months for an MRI.

I asked if I could pay for a private option there. There was no such option back then. Not "expensive" - it simply didn't exist.

Meanwhile, day by day my body was getting worse.

I needed to lie in bed most of the time to avoid pain triggers. And I had to put my job on hold.

Then one day my phone rang. Someone had cancelled their MRI slot at 3AM the next day.

I remember thinking: I got lucky. In this system, a cancelled 3am slot is what winning looks like.

In this system, a cancelled 3am slot is what winning looks like.

The MRI came back.

MRI imaging film — The imaging that took a cancelled 3AM slot to get. The answer inside it took another 13-month queue.

Second MRI imaging film — The imaging that took a cancelled 3AM slot to get. The answer inside it took another 13-month queue.

My PCP looked at it and gave me the next number:

13 months

Not a treatment plan. A queue. A queue for a neurosurgeon.

If I simply waited as I was told, my life would stall for a year. My job gone. Then my apartment. Maybe eventually my partner.And my health might cross a point of no return before treatment came.

Every day in that queue was a day of living pain. My life turned upside down. Unable to take care of myself, unable to take care of my loved one. Unable to do most chores - she had to do all for me while I could only watch.

If I let this run another ten months like I was told to, I risked trading a possibly treatable condition for a permanent one. Or I might eventually have my back fixed, but find the life it was supposed to carry already gone.

So I did what more people do every year than you'd think: I looked abroad. And that's when I learned the real problem isn't the care. The care, at the right hospitals in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, etc. is world-class. The problem is everything around it.

Nobody was accountable for me. That was the problem.

Nobody could tell me which hospitals to trust.

There's a night I researched on my phone for seven hours straight, went through pages of Google reviews and still couldn't reach a conclusion - reviews can be bought, and I knew it.

I asked AI, and got back whatever had the best SEO, dressed up as an answer.

I found agencies that matched patients with hospitals in India or Mexico. I reached out to one, and they came back with three options - no explanation of why these three, or why for me.

Were they chosen because their expertise fit my condition? Or because they paid the highest kickbacks?

I still wanted more options to compare, so I kept going:

Registering accounts on hospital portals that require local IDs
Typing my details into 50-field forms
Emailing my medical documents to generic info@ mailboxes that hundreds of staff have access to
Only to find out many of the hospitals don't even offer virtual consultation

In the end, what actually got me a name I could trust was my partner asking around: her friend's sister was a medical student, who recommended a doctor in Hong Kong. That was the state of the art - a friend of a friend's sister.

That was the state of the art - a friend of a friend's sister.

Eventually I still went with her recommendation - a doctor at a top-tier hospital in Hong Kong.

I got through it. The care I received was fantastic.

Hospital-bed view of a football match during recovery — Nothing special about this room - that was the point. For the first time in a long period of time, I was bored instead of in pain

Sometimes I still think about the versions of this story where I wasn't lucky.

The one where I wasn't brave enough and just waited the 13 months.

The one where I flew abroad but landed with a bad doctor who was simply good at marketing.

I got the lucky ending, through the friend of a friend's sister.

I came home with a conviction I couldn't shake:

This should not require luck, connections, or weeks of terrified research.

LUCK

A cancelled 3AM slot. A friend of a friend's sister.

CONNECTIONS

The right name came from someone who happened to know someone.

TERRIFIED RESEARCH

Seven hours a night, and still no way to know who to trust.

Well-off patients have had this arranged for them for decades - quietly, through concierges. The rest of us were left to figure it out alone

Kibo is the company I needed then, and couldn't find.

So my co-founders and I built it. Charles, Derek and I have known each other for about a decade - long enough to hold each other to the version of this company we'd want our own families to use.

That's the test we run every decision through: would I send my mother through this? If the answer is no, we don't ship it, we don't sign the clinic, and we don't put our name on it.