Aster DM Healthcare & LSV Capital Roll Out Healthtech Incubator With $50 Mn Corpus

Bengaluru-based conglomerate healthcare provider Aster DM Healthcare in partnership with investment firm Life Science Vision Capital and Social Alpha, on Friday (May 22), announced to have set up an incubator-cum-accelerator named XHealth Innovation Lab to bolster healthtech startups.

According to sources quoted in a report by the Economic Times, XHealth Innovation Lab has been set up with an initial corpus of $50 Mn. Out of the total corpus, investors have reportedly committed 60% of the funding.

Aster DM Healthcare chief innovation officer Satish Prasad Rath said that the company plans to accelerate the discovery of new therapies by leveraging deeptech in the field of healthcare. Rath noted that Aster’s network of hospitals and healthcare expertise with Life Science Vision Capital’s investment philosophy and industry capabilities will help in building newer solutions that can revitalise the healthcare system in a sustainable way.

According to Rath, Covid-19 has pushed the healthcare system to look for disruptive solutions. During the pandemic, healthcare’s focus shifted to manufacturing lab-on-a-chip diagnostics, a support system for healthcare workers in the form of personal protection equipment (PPE) or remote ICU diagnostics and virtually managing chronic and elderly patients through digital healthcare.

The innovation labs will incubate around 10 startups in each cohort twice a year. These startups will develop both scientific and commercial solutions. The innovation lab will run a 12-week incubator programme. After this, the startup will spend two weeks at Aster’s hospitals in Bengaluru.

As of now, 10 health tech startups are expected to be graduating in January 2021. The incubation labs will start accepting applications from June 20 for the first cohort starting in October 2020.

LSV Capital Partners Managing Partner Shu Joshi said that life science and healthtech startups are looking for a data-driven digital innovation approach to help fuel the creation of accessible healthcare solutions. For the incubation lab, Aster and LSV will focus on leveraging analytics and deeptech to better understand key diseases and extract-related insights.

Healthtech Incubators In India

According to Datalabs by Inc42, there are a total of 4,892 startups in the Indian healthtech space as of 2018. Overall, the healthtech startups in India raised a total of $504 Mn between 2014-2018.

IBEF estimates that the Indian healthcare market will be valued at $372Bn by 2022 and healthtech startups are expected to play a key role to back this growth and startup incubators are helping these startups to grow and market themselves better.

Some of the notable healthtech incubators in India are Venture Catalysts-backed HealthCare Catalysts. IITM HTIC MedTech Incubator, state-run Centre for Cellular And Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP), HealthStart, among others.