Practo acquires Genii, targets enterprise segment
After raising $30M earlier this year from Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners and announcing the acquisition of the digital fitness solution startup Fitho in April, one of the biggest successes in healthcare IT space from India, Practo today announced acquisition of Genii. Genii is a product outsourcing firm with domain experience building bespoke e-commerce portals, SaaS platforms across retail, media, finance and other industries for clients including Axis Bank, Mediassist, Economic Times, HDFC RED and others.
The acquisition aims at strengthening the tech team at Practo and help accelerate time to market across enterprise segment.
Founded in 2009 by Shashank ND and Abhinav Lal, both alumni of NIT Surathkal, Practo is hiring aggressively and plans to double its 1000 member team by the year end. The company also claims to have an exceptionally low attrition rate. Practo's two main offering in the market include:
- Practo Search – doctor search engine for patients
- Practo Ray – practice management solution for doctors managing patients and digital healthcare records
Practo already lists over 8,000 hospitals on its platform and will expand this to over 20,000 by end of this year.
Post acquisition
The founders of Genii, Varun Vohra and Aditya Anand, along with the 11-member team will join Practo and move to Bangalore. Genii founders will lead product teams and accelerate Practo’s growth in enterprise space with products focused around hospitals, diagnostic centers and others.
This is the second of several acquisitions Practo is exploring. It gives the company a fast way to scale and the ability to further accelerate our roadmap. Shashank says,
It is the next step in our mission to make Practo your health app. We believe acquisitions are a fantastic way to add world class like-minded talent to our team. We continue to look at acquiring great talent and technology.
According to Varun, Genii decided to join Practo over some of the others because of the high impact vision, commitment to great products and their collaborative approach.
What else?
Apart from acquisitions, Practo is looking at other strategies as well. In alignment with the Digital India campaign by PMO India, Practo aims to get more doctors, hospitals and pharmacies online and on mobile. But Shashank had earlier emphasized that their focus is going to be on health records and subscription segment and they are not looking at fulfilment (delivery) part at all. They are looking to acquire companies in Middle-East Africa and Latin America as well.
India’s mobile technology infrastructure and the launch of 4G has driven mobile health (mHealth) adoption in the country. The industry is expected to reach $0.6 billion by 2017.