Ayu Health, a chain of hospitals started by the founders of Sequoia-backed Zefo, has raised $6.3 million (about Rs 46 crore) in a Series A financing round from Vertex Ventures, Stellaris Venture Partners and others.
The round also saw angel investors including Varun Alagh of Mamaearth, Ashish Gupta of Helion, and Rajat Goel of EyeQ Hospitals involved.
The startup was founded in 2019 by Arjit Gupta and Himesh Joshi, both of whom also founded the used-goods marketplace Zefo in 2015 along with others, which was acquired by Quikr in 2019.
Zefo had raised close to $20 million from investors such as Sequoia Capital, Helion Ventures and Beenext.
Ayu Health was founded in 2019 to work with more than 20 hospitals in Chandigarh and Bengaluru. The company said it enables hospitals in its network with technology to maintain clinical standards and serve patients at an affordable cost.
This fund infusion will help Ayu expand its hospital network and build new technology solutions to enable insurance processing, efficient procurement and clinical quality management at network hospitals. Ayu Health expects to grow its business ten-fold in FY22 and expand its capacity to 5000+ beds in six cities by December 2022, the company said in a statement.
Ritesh Agarwal-led budget hotel chain OYO also follows a similar model when it comes to the hotel and hospitality segment. The company partners with hotel chains across 80 countries offer tech solutions to digitise their business and claims to further enhance their business proposition.
“The OYO analogy is fine, primarily this being a similarly asset-light model. We are also doing a lot more than just demand generation for our partners – technology for patient management and experience, procurement and insurance processing,” Joshi added.
Joshi believes that India’s healthcare space is still fragmented and the patients aren’t always sure about where to go and the quality of clinical services. “We felt very strongly whether there was a need to create a branded hospital that could solve for three pain points — transparency and pricing, consistently good clinical outcomes and a high-quality experience,” Joshi said.
The Indian health tech market is estimated to touch $21 billion by 2025, which is just 3.3% of the total addressable healthcare market pegged to reach $638 billion in 2025.
Health tech start-up funding in FY 2020-21 went down by more than 43% ($443 million raised in FY 2020-21 compared to FY 2019-2020’s $790 million). But, with $689 million invested during the first four months of 2021, the sector has already raised 30% more funding than the entire 2020.