Indian Medtech Startup Gets $10M Injection to Be Facebook for Healthcare

Friday, July 10, 2015

Indian healthcare communication platform Lybrate announced today it has secured US$10.2 million in series A funding from Tiger Global Management, Indian business tycoon Ratan Tata, and existing investor Nexus Venture Partners. The company previously received US$1.2 million in seed funding.

Lybrate enables users to get credible solutions or second opinions for their health issues from a pool of trusted doctors on an open-ended platform. It also provides private consultation with a doctor of their choice. Users can share their medical reports, pictures, prior medications, or any other record in a one-on-one discussion with the doctor.

Besides communication, Lybrate enables patients to book appointments, store medical records, or communicate anonymously with doctors. Thestartup also provides practice management solutions to doctors to manage appointments, medical records, and maintaining relationships with patients.

The startup claims to have 80,000 doctors from various specialties from across India connected with its service. The app has half a million downloads in the last five months and over 100,000 patients visiting the platform every day. The fresh funding will be used to develop products, recruit talent, augment technology, and scale operations.

Replicating Facebook

Before starting Lybrate, founder Saurabh Arora was working with Facebook as a data scientist to help small and medium-sized businesses connect with their customers using Facebook’s ad platform. “I wanted to come back to India and utilize the same skill set of connecting people using technology and was intrigued by the lack of innovation in healthcare despite the booming ecommerce industry. Hence I decided to start Lybrate that would go on to leverage mobile phones as a primary medium to get connected to doctors across India,” Arora tellsTech in Asia.

What also triggered Arora is the fact that India has a huge scarcity of trusted doctors. “There’s a large supply-demand gap in India in the healthcare delivery sector. Roughly, we only have one doctor available per 1,800 people. The situation is even worse than these figures, as a majority of good doctors are concentrated in metropolitan and tier-1 cities. I always believed that technology can help bridge this scarcity to a great extent. I was helping SMEs connect with their users, and all I needed was to replicate that model to establish seamless connection between patients and doctors,” he says.

Source: Tech in Asia (link opens in a new window)

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