Health-tech’s the new Buzz in the ‘Startup’ Town!

The health-tech sector has been gaining handsome tractions from investors. This calls for an alluring future. Here’s why!

When you Google about the latest update on startup funding, it would reveal the second largest Series-C round of any Indian company till date. Health and fitness startup CureFit has raised $120 million from existing investors IDG Ventures, Accel Partners, and Kalaari Capital.

CureFit launched its mobile app cure.fit in May last year. They are currently operating from Bengaluru, Delhi-NCR and Hyderabad. The company claims to have more than one lakh active subscribers across its various offerings. It has subsidiaries like ‘cult.fit’ ‘eat.fit’ and ‘mind.fit’. ‘Cult.fit’ offers a mix of group workouts, and routines that add to the consumer’s fitness needs. Mind.fit specializes in yoga and meditation classes for mind-body fitness. Eat.fit provides healthy and wholesome meals to consumers. Cure.fit has over 75 Cult.fit and Mind.Fit centres and aims to escalate to over 500 centers in the next three years. Eat.fit is currently servicing over 10,000 meals a day and claims to be doubling this figure every three months. Its acquisitions include ‘1000yoga’ and ‘Kristys Kitchen’.

Some Stats

According to a recent PWC report, India ranks among the top 10 global growth markets for nutritional food and beverages. Furthermore, the Indian healthcare market, which is approximately worth $100 billion, is likely to grow 23 percent Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) to reach $280 billion by 2020, as per a Deloitte report in 2016.

Other Deals in the Space

What’s exciting is that serious investments have been taking place off late. Several ventures in the broader healthcare and health-tech space have raised funding in the recent past. Last week US-based ‘RoundGlass Partners’ invested heftily in Gympik.com. Early this month, home diagnostic services provider ‘5th Vital’ raised $500,000 from ‘Brand Capital’ and a group of high net worth individuals (HNIs). This year in April, FMCG major ‘Marico Ltd’ acquired upto 22.5 percent stake in fitness and holistic wellness platform ‘Revofit’.

Online pharmacy startups such as Netmeds (secured a $14 million funding) have contributed significantly to the health-tech sector. Mention may be made of other worthy startups like 1mg, Medfinder, Practo, Curofy, Portea Medical, and Medgenome. The health-tech sector in India has approximately raised $346 million across 111 deals.

With the roll of money across the health-tech sector in the startup space, it is certain to bloom in the near future. According to industry experts, in 2018, health-tech experts would be working more towards integrating more cutting edge technologies such as IoT (Internet of Things), Big Data analytics and medical devices into the healthcare space. It is to be seen how innovative can the startups be, and what strategies would they adopt to compete with their rivals.