Kalaari-Backed ConnectedH Shuts Shop, To Return Capital To Investors

Kalaari Capital-backed ConnectedH has become the latest casualty of the funding winter as its founders decided to wind up the healthtech startup’s operations last month. 

ConnectedH cofounder Suresh Singh, in a LinkedIn post, said that the startup shut shop and will return the remaining capital to the investors. He said that the startup ‘ran into certain market realities’ which could not be addressed. 

“In the course, we ran into certain market realities which couldn’t be changed with the resources we had and our place in the ecosystem, which led to the decision,” added Singh. 

On layoffs that occurred at the startup as a consequence of the shutdown, the cofounder noted that his ‘team members’ have been placed in their next roles. 

Inc42 has reached out to Singh for a comment on the story. The article will be updated on receiving a response. 

Founded in 2018 by Subham Gupta, Rahul Kumar, and Singh, ConnectedH was a full-stack B2B healthtech startup that offered CRM solutions, online report management tools and other services for diagnostic labs. 

Reminiscing about his time as the cofounder of the startup, Singh said ConnectedH, over the course of five years, catered to more than 5 Lakh patients of 400-plus healthcare providers across 5 cities. The startup claimed to have built a database of 10 Mn health data points during the course of its run. 

Citing numbers that nearly 95% of startups fail, Singh said ConnectedH defied ‘odds for five years’.

As per Singh, the startup raised $2.5 Mn in funding during the course of its lifetime. The startup counted marquee names such as Kalaari Capital, Incubate Fund India and angel investors such as CRED’s Kunal Shah, Roman Saini of Unacademy, ShareChat’s Farid Ahsan, and OfBusiness’ Ashish Mohapatra and Ruchi Kalra among its backers.

The decision to shut down came barely two years after the healthtech startup bagged $2.3 Mn in a seed funding round.

Meanwhile, cofounder Singh, in his post, said he would iron out the idea of a new venture over the course of the next couple of months. 

“Having been through the full spectrum of emotions and stages a founder goes through… has put me on a surer footing for what follows next. The journey shall continue. I want to be associated with this ecosystem and would be leveraging the learnings to figure out what shape and form it will take over the next couple of months,” he said. 

With this, ConnectedH has joined a growing list of Indian startups that have shut shop in the past few months. Last month, Inc42 reported on how former Zynga India head, Shailesh Chaganlal Daxini, silently shut his startup Vah Vah after mass layoffs at the company. 

Earlier, it emerged that Deepika Padukone-backed FrontRow shut shop in mid-June after failing to score an acquisition deal and laying off 90% of its workforce. Prior to that, Accel-backed crypto platform Pillow and coworking space provider Friyey also wound up operations. 

The mass shutdowns have largely been attributed to the ongoing funding crunch in the Indian startup ecosystem. With investors focusing on profitability and sustainability now, the ecosystem has been witnessing a revamp of sorts for over the last year or so. 

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