Exclusive: Healthtech Startup Abita Gets Seed Funding From Global Incubator Sky7Ventures, Others

Gurugram-based healthtech startup Abita Healthcare has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding led by Michigan-based early stage fund and global incubator Sky7Ventures, the company told Inc42.

Other investors who participated in the round include Vignesh Ramanujam, investor and board member at Ritex, Younify and Chaicup; Balasubramanian Sankaranarayanan, EVP head, Thryve Digital Health; Navy Ramavat, managing director, Indira securities; and Swapnil Mehta.

Founded by two doctors, Jatin Kakrani and Avi Ramavat along with an MBA graduate Hitesh Kakrani, Abita Healthcare offers integrated technology operations to provide automated and optimised management of practice for its partner medical practitioners.

In November 2017, the trio began their healthtech startup with two clinics in Tier 2 city, Indore, Madhya Pradesh. The team then reached the beta testing stage in April 2018, with six paid clinics and started full-scale operations.

The company now works with more than 40 clinics across Indore, Pune and Ahmedabad. Explaining the reason for starting up in Tier 2 cities rather than metro cities, Hitesh explained that technology innovation is much more needed in the smaller cities with lack of technology touch for doctor’s day-to-day operations.

“It digitises entire speciality clinics workflow, optimises unit operations and automates all the peripheral processes including pre and post-care, patient education, procedure-wise time allocation, and pre-operative checklist compliance,” Hitesh told Inc42.

Investors Support The Niche Move In Healthcare

With the influx of fresh funds, Abita Healthcare plans to use the proceeds to expand to more cities and strengthen its foothold with more products and even better collaborations.

Vineet Katial, managing director of Sky7ventures and founding member, Detroit TIE angels said “India’s healthcare sector is one of the fastest growing segments within India. However, it is highly fragmented and therefore very inefficient.  We had been looking for companies with out of the box thinking to solve this problem and Abita’s innovative approach backed with a stellar team and strong work ethics really impressed us.”

Hitesh emphasised that their investors also bring in a lot of technology businesses experience, specially healthtech experience behind them which they plan to leverage to develop really robust operations as it scales up. For example, one of the investors Balasubramanian Sankaranarayanan has led life sciences and healthcare at Genpact and Cognizant which gives company sector confidence.

The company claims that its tech ecosystem helps medical practitioners save 20-30% of the operational cost, get higher revenues and more productive core practice hours.

Hitesh explained that the company also has plans to expand its niche offerings to services where the inventory demand is heavy and constant like dermatology, dental care etc.

The company has aligned with more than 100 new customers, which it will start deploying products this month. The company earns its revenue through subscription charges and commissions.

Doc32: Managing Operations For Dentists

With its first product, Doc32, the company provides data analytics on clinic’s performance (insight driven, revenue and margins), item-specific supplies inventory required for a month and doctor’s performance matrix like treatment conversions.

It also provides system generated specific speciality patient health and hygiene scores, which further opens up into specific issue-based scores.

Hitesh explained that unlike listing platforms and workflow management platforms Doc32’s USP is building highly customised products as it works alongside doctors, based on their requirements and needs as it takes into consideration aspects ranging from frequency of consumer engagement/ purchase pattern, time spent in clinic, use of diagnostic equipment, COGS and consultation patterns.

The company has also tied up with local suppliers and global technology providers to collaborate for its technology backend. The company currently has offices in Indore, Gurugram as well as Michigan to leverage strong technology competencies.

Some of the interesting capabilities of Doc32 include patient experience and exhaustive data. Hitesh explained that as soon as a patient is checked-in, a complete digital prescription screen opens up with a synced flow in tabs of – Complain, History, Diagnosis, Counselling, Treatment, Prescription and Invoicing.

“It standardises the patient experience and captures exhaustive data for each patient which helps in accurate diagnosis, right record keeping and complete data for future analysis,” he said.

However, the company also recognises the trust issues that tag along with the record of data and believes that it is not easy to win the trust of partner doctors, their concerns of patient data misuse or becoming dependent on listing/ discovery platforms.

“The best fit approach is to partner with a genuine practitioner and enable him to deliver better, every good doctor ultimately wants to do the best for his patients. The best approach is to have a simple target of enabling him/ her then to try any other measures of outcome control,” Hitesh said.

To further increase trust quotient and create a wholesome integrated tech ecosystem for a doctor, the company also wants to build a robust base system and keep collaborating with the right solutions as well.

At present, the company has tied up with Epinlabs – (Gift card/ code and subscription voucher generation), Vista Money (payment solutions), Sinlkd (secure video conferencing) and variety of continuing medical education content builders, which are all integrated within its platform.

Through its end-to-end integration on a subscription-based model, the company is able to make $171.65 – $214.57 (INR 12,000- INR 15,000) from each clinic annually. It further aims to increase it to nearly $286 (INR 20,000) as it looks to add more value-added services in the next two months.

Healthcare: A Widening Opportunity

The Indian healthcare market, which is worth $100 Bn, is likely to grow at 23% CAGR to reach $280 Bn by 2020.

With rising middle-class, state-of-the-art healthcare facilities, expert physicians, and increased dependency on technology to facilitate healthcare at the prevention stage the industry is expected to attain double-digit growth.

However, amid products enabling listing for doctors like Practo etc, medical insurance startups like PolicyBazaar’s DocPrime and startups like Visit, Zoctr, Lybrate etc offering guidance services to patients, doctors still lack technology upgradation and support.

According to the Medical Council of India, the country 10.41 Lakh registered doctors as on September 30, 2017. This makes 10.41 Lakh doctors catering to 1.35 Bn population of India without any technology support.

Also, the market for diagnostics services has been growing in India over the past couple of years at a rate of 15%-20% and stood at nearly $5.82 Bn (INR 40,000 Cr) as of 2016.

As Abita Healthcare identifies more niche focus areas to target more than 500 clinics in the next six months, the company’s focus remains to build the business ground-up and create a frugal robust chassis before scaling up further.