Eight Roads, Touchstone, Ventureast Back ekincare Ahead Of International Expansion

Hyderabad-headquartered healthtech startup ekincare, on Wednesday (November 13), said that it has raised $3.6 Mn in Series A funding round. The company said that undisclosed new investors with participation from existing investors including Eight Roads, Touchstone Equities and Ventureast invested in the round.

Talking to Inc42, Kiran Kalakuntla, CEO and founder, ekincare said that the fresh funds will be used towards marketing and sales efforts as the company has mostly grown through word of mouth references till now.

He said that the company is also eyeing international expansion in South Asian countries such as the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. After this round, the total funding raised by ekincare is $5.6 Mn.

Founded in 2014 by Kalakuntla and Srikanth Samudrala, ekincare is a health benefits platform for businesses. ekincare helps companies administer benefits efficiently, optimise their healthcare spendings and show real health outcomes.

Ekincare: 5X Y-o-Y Growth And More

The platform offers preventive health services like telemedicine, e-pharmacy, health checks, vision and dental care, access to gyms, and other services for every individual, through a personalised journey on the platform.

The company claims that its AI-powered health assistant reads medical data from disparate data sets to create a health graph, predicts health risks, and provides timely personalised recommendations to beat those risks.

It claims to work with over 200 corporates, impacting over 300K employees creating more than 5 Mn health data points. The company has tied up with healthcare service providers such as Apollo Clinic, SRL Diagnostics, etc across more than 75 cities.

With a team of 160 employees, ekincare is working across Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, etc. The company claims to have grown 5x in revenues in the last financial year and is targeting a similar growth for this year. Kalakuntla said that the company is growing 150-200% in terms of revenues on a Q-o-Q basis.

Kalakuntla told us that ekincare follows a B2B2C approach as the company found the model better than the B2C approach which is costlier. It claims that with ekincare, organisations can administer their health benefits efficiently, improve outcomes and reduce healthcare costs by up to 25%.

He explained to us that artificial intelligence is being leveraged to structure the data coming in as well as providing personalised support to the employees.

Vinay Rao from Ventureast explained that why B2B or B2B2C is a better way to go about doing this especially in this scenario, “is because you need a little bit more controlled environment when your product marketing is happening. Just like a corporate where you have a digital platform but at the same time you also have a human resource or human touchpoint to effectively check  technology and human touch point, therefore, here, along with gamification and medical resources can altogether come and create a bigger impact and make sure that the lifestyle choices that these people have to make in order to become more healthy is actually happening.”

B2B Pie Of Healthtech In India

According to a report by Deloitte, with increased digital adoption, the Indian healthcare market, which is already growing at a CAGR of about 20%, will touch a whopping $280 Bn by 2020. And the revenue of India’s corporate healthcare sector is estimated to grow at 15% in 2017-18.

In India, corporate health is on an uptick with the rise in annual health insurance premiums, inflation in healthcare costs and trending loss ratios at 107%. More than 40% of companies have a budget of more than INR 1000 per employee for health benefits beyond medical insurance, as per the report published by PeopleMatters.

According to DataLabs by Inc42 estimates, the total market size of the healthcare industry in India is projected to be $202 Bn this year. This is a growth of 84% from the $110 Bn market size in the year 2016. The healthtech sector has gained significant investor interest as well. According to DataLabs, the healthtech startups have raised $1.9 Bn across 405 deals between 2014-H1 2019.

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