2070 Health Bags $30 Mn To Build India’s First Healthcare Venture Studio

Healthcare venture studio 2070 Health has raised $30 Mn as part of its seed funding round from US-based venture capital firm W Health Ventures. 

The venture studio will deploy a part of the capital to build the platform, hire more employees and spruce up its tech stack. The capital will also be utilised as pre-seed capital to launch new startups in the healthtech space. 

Speaking to Inc42, CEO of 2070 Health Pankaj Jethwani said that the platform will invest in 15-20 startups over the course of four to five years. While it has already launched three startups, it also plans to unveil another company in the next few months. 

Without disclosing the average ticket size, Jethwani said that the studio is eyeing two to three launches a year and focussing on scaling these healthtech platforms from scratch. 

“… The healthcare industry is slow to change, relationship-driven, highly regulated and complex to navigate for new entrants… We invested in 2070 Health to address these challenges that founders face while innovating in healthcare. Via companies launched by 2070 Health, we aim to impact the future of healthcare for one billion Indians over the next decade,” said the president of W Health, Sunil Wadhwani.

According to Jethwani, the studio will largely ideate and build startups that will have a minimum addressable market of 100-300 Mn users and prioritise areas where it is capable of building a 10X better solution than existing products in the market. 

“Our guiding principle is keeping patient experience and results front and centre. I’m grateful to the 100+ incredible team members of the Studio or our three companies. I am confident that what we are building will attract the best talent, partners, and capital, and together with them, we will transform the way healthcare is delivered in India,” added Jethwani.

Founded in 2023, 2070 Health claims to be India’s first health-focussed venture studio. Armed with a seasoned cross-functional team and a cohort of founders, the platform claims to evaluate hundreds of potential ideas that address white spaces in healthcare, which subsequently undergo a validation process at the venture studio. 

The proposed solution is run through clinical studies and go-to-market experiments to finally devise a proposed product range. Afterwards, Health 2070 brings together a founding team and deploys various playbooks across clinical development, product, marketing, omnichannel growth, and enterprise partnerships to further fuel the ideas. 

The studio also claims to have built a 40-member team across venture design, product development, and go-to-market verticals that work closely with the founders to grow the portfolio startups. 

It also pumps in seed capital to kick-start the operations of these companies and then the startup is free to raise further funds. 

“We are developing these playbooks leveraging the team’s decades of experience building healthcare, technology, and consumer companies. The goal is to scale our companies faster, better, and cheaper than traditional startups in the riskiest early months of company building,” Jethwani added. 

On how it intends to navigate the healthcare red tape, he said that the studio has a vibrant team that looks after the regulatory changes and compliances to adhere to local norms. Describing the studio’s investment thesis, Jethwani told Inc42 that 2070 Health currently targets two major areas — Indian startups building for Bharat and Indian startups building SaaS products for global markets. 

As part of this, 2070 Health has already unveiled three startups as part of its first cohort — ‘medical’ weight loss startup ElevateNow, tech-led pain management chain of clinics Nivaan Care, and healthtech SaaS platform Reveal HealthTech.

Despite the ongoing funding winter and waning pandemic-era growth, the homegrown healthtech ecosystem is poised for growth, and it is this industry that 2070 Health intends to tap into. 

According to an Inc42 report, India’s healthtech overall market is projected to balloon to a market size of $21.3 Bn by 2025 on the back of greater adoption of digital health services and rising internet penetration.