Japanese Healthtech Co M3 Picks Up Majority Stake In DailyRounds

M3 India, the Indian subsidiary of Japanese Healthtech company M3, has picked up a majority stake in Bengaluru-based edtech startup Neuroglia Health Private Limited (NHPL), which owns and operates the app DailyRounds, for an undisclosed amount.

Post-acquisition, M3 said it will foray into case-based problem-solving community platform and medical test preparation business in India. M3 also intends to import services and technologies developed in Japan and/or internationally into India. This includes job placement support services and AI applications, with an aim to build the next generation healthcare technologies.

The 200 odd strong DailyRounds team will be part of M3 group. Further, Dr.Deepu Sebin will be taking leadership roles in M3 group as well.

M3 India And DailyRounds Collaboration

As a joint venture between M3 Inc. Japan Health Care at Home India Pvt. Ltd in 2016, M3 India is an online portal that helps Indian doctors stay abreast with the latest in research, medical news, evidence-based medicine, practice guidelines and expert articles.

Japan-based M3 is a specialised web portal for medical professionals that delivers healthcare-related information to its over 270K physician members and over 4.5 Mn physician members globally across multiple websites, to offer marketing, clinical trials, and various other services in healthcare and pharmaceutical industries.

“With this majority acquisition, M3 will now be able to reach out to 450K doctors in India on a consolidated basis, while enhancing the utility and satisfaction levels among doctors by leveraging the strengths of both platforms,” Amit Singh, CEO of HIPL (M3 India) said.

He further added that the acquisition will also enable M3 to escalate its marketing support and market research businesses to pharmaceutical and medical devices companies through expansion of doctor membership and enhancement of medical education contents.

What Makes DailyRounds An Interesting Bet?

Founded in 2015 by Dr. Deepu Sebin, Priyank Choubey and Nimmi Cherian, DailyRounds is a mobile app for doctors, medical schools, physician, and surgeon societies to publish clinical cases, articles, and images. It also offers Marrow, a test-preparation platform to enter post-graduate specialty courses in medical schools in India.

The company has raised more than $500K in multiple funding rounds from investors such as Accel Partners, Kae Capital, Powerhouse Ventures and Beenext. It was also a part of Microsoft Ventures Summer 2015 batch.

“The Indian doctor community is very active on DailyRounds and Marrow. With the support of M3 we will be offer better services to the existing Doctors. Further we hope to bring in new Doctors as well,”  Dr. Deepu Sebin, CEO of DailyRounds said.

Primary care, internal medicine, cardiology, radiology, and emergency medicine are the specialties offered by DailyRounds. The doctors joining the network go through a three-level security test to ensure their medical credibility and verifiability.

The platform allows doctors to share insights about medical cases. It claims to provide a verified diagnosis within 24 hours of submission. It also functions as a medical case library for doctors to refer and discuss their cases.

Edtech In India

India’s healthtech space has been vibrant with various innovations to support doctors, clinics, hospitals etc from treating a patient to managing every day filings or prescriptions. However, as an academic platform for doctors, DailyRounds is creating its own niche in the wide edtech sector of India.

Inc42 in its Annual Tech Startup Funding Report 2018 said that edtech startups raised $695 Mn in 56 funding deals for the year. A report by the India Didactics Association said that the online education industry in India is projected to grow almost eight times to hit $1.96 Bn (INR 13,795 Cr) by 2021.

According to a May 2017 Google-KPMG report, the Indian online education sector may witness up to 8X growth in the next five years.

As an educator in the country, it competes with players such as BYJU’S, Unacademy, UpGrad etc, however, its niche focus to enable conversations between doctors makes it the Github of Indian doctors. As M3 brings its network strength to DailyRounds, the company’s merged capacities can bring the next wave of collaboration support for Indian doctors.