Some exciting startups in the HealthTech Space #health2india

James Matthews, a good friend and entrepreneur invited me to attend the Health 2.0 Conference for entrepreneurs and healthcare professionals today and speak about Health Tech investments. About 80 to 100 folks were in attendance, featuring about 30 entrepreneurs, 25 investors and the others were from Pharma companies, Hospitals and diagnostics chains.

Our panel featured an entrepreneur (Poonacha), a healthcare product company (GE) VP (Partha) and Ravi from Zanec.

There were 4 startups that were allowed to pitch the investors, and while there was no commitment from the investors, the startups were not looking to raise immediately either. This was a session for them to get some feedback from potential investors.

There are 3 high level observations that relate to investing and entrepreneurship in the space that I want to highlight first and then talk about the interesting companies.

1. Older Indians overall have little respect for preventive healthcare or do not value it at all. If you are in the wellness space or “be healthy” space, the market will be relatively small is what I gathered. I hear many entrepreneurs say their target market is 25-40 year olds. I think the real market for wellness products, services and solutions is 25-30 year old’s. How can I prove that? Look at gym membership in India. There are 70K members for the 300+ gyms and the prices are fairly high. Why? Because gyms are a luxury item in India. The average cost of a membership is between INR 500 per month (non chain) to about INR 4000 (Gold’s gym). It is not that older Indians dont want to live healthy. They think that paying for “wellness” is overrated.

2. Going after solutions for doctors, clinics or hospitals is a curse from hell for startups. Most smart entrepreneurs are focusing on the patient (consumer) via the influencer (doctor). Which means that for healthtech startups, distribution and sales are less of an issue, but consumer adoption and more importantly usage is more critical. Most consumers in India don’t have the discipline to master wellness and focus on preventive health choices, and the ones that do are far and few between.

3. Indian doctors see almost 2-3 times the number of patients a day as American doctors do, and still make 1/3 as much them. Solutions to make doctors more productive by educating patients, transferring more work to nurses, etc. will likely do well.

Here are the 7 interesting companies I met at the conference today, and here is a summary, in the order of when I met them.

1. Diabeto: is a diabetes management analytics application and device. It transfers your glucose readings from your Glucometer into your smartphone and cloud so your caregiver can monitor it. Rather than do a lot of automation, which will force the company to get an FDA approval, they do just enough. Very interesting company and a neat product and they have many inquiries from distributors from other countries. The global diabetes care market is fairly large so I think they are on their way to raise some amount of early seed funding.

2. Zest.MD: is an online clinic for nutritionists. The SaaS solution helps bring any nutritionists services online so consumers can review and purchase via the web. Longer term the company is looking to be a curated marketplace for people wanting to make healthy choices. I thought this was fairly good, but I am still skeptical of the size of this market.

3. Praxify: is a connected patient records management for doctors and patients. They were positioned as an EMR (Electronic Medical Records) but the market for that is long gone and dead. The average doctor hates using the EMR product and the patients dont understand its benefit enough. Good team and product, so this is a company to watch. Disclosure: they are a Microsoft Ventures company.

4. Fitternity: is a directory, content website, ecommerce platform and database for people wanting to be healthy. The product is aimed at people who care about being fit, by offering advice, products and service referrals. I have seen many such offerings, so I am not sure what their differentiation is.

5. Care Companion: is a education tool for care-givers: nurses, wives, parents, etc. Since doctors dont have time to explain the same things to each patient’s care givers, this product aims to provide the standard advice my means of videos. E.g. Assume that your child, after a doctor’s visit has to to avoid certain foods, take pills in the morning and night, but not afternoon, etc. this product will provide those simple instructions by disease or symptom.

6. Cyber Liver: They provide a breathalyzer which nudges you to avoid drinking too much alcohol. This is a extension (hardware) to your iPhone or Android phone that you breath into every time you drink. It keeps track of how much you drink each week and uploads that to the cloud, ensuring that you know if you had too much to drink. Very interesting idea, but users have to remember to breath into the device after they consume alcohol each time, and I don think they will do this often enough to make a difference.

7. mTatva: is a prescription transcription and alerting tool. Your prescription is scanned at the hospital to the cloud and your dosage and medicines are sent by SMS. Then it also send the prescription to your favorite pharmacist via SMS and will alert you each day and time with the dosage information. I liked the idea, but adoption is currently sparse.

There were a few other companies, measuring (using multiple sensors) the weight of your pill box to intelligently alert you when you dont take your medicines, etc.

Overall the signal to noise ratio at this event was VERY high. James has curated an excellent set of entrepreneurs and I was pleased to see such a diverse set of folks innovating in Heath Tech.