Shashank ND, Co-Founder and CEO of Practo on challenges, funding and evolution of the company and the healthcare industry
One of the fastest growing healthcare companies in the world, Practo has been making news over the last few months for all the right reasons. The company has put healthcare in the mainstream of startup innovation and expansion. Two rounds of funding and acquisitions have helped Practo build on the strong foundation which took some time to form.
Founded in 2008, by National Institute of Technology(NIT), Surathkal graduates Shashank ND & Abhinav Lal, the healthcare startup has come a long wayin the last seven years and with international expansion and the recent series C funding of $90 million, one can say that this is just the beginning.The 1500 member team plans to hire another 500 people by this year end.
Shashank spoke at MobileSparks 2015 about the growth and integration of mobile and healthcare. At the time of starting the company, the biggest challenge was to bring doctors online as the penetration of web was low and the smartphone revolution was still nascent. Today, Practo claims to have nearly 200,000 healthcare practitioners, 8000 hospitals on its platform and over 10 million monthly searches by consumers. The growth is majorly fuelled by the focus on expansion and getting doctors on the platform.
We spoke to Shashank about the recent developments and challenges at Practo. In the following video, we touched upon a few topics like:
- What changes will be brought forth with the $90M funding round and what’s the significance of this investment(besides the cash flow)?
- How has healthcare and Practo’s vision evolved over the last seven years?
- What are the major challenges of scaling up the organization to a 1500 member team?
(Video editing: Anjali Achal)
Shashank had earlier shared in an interview that unlike many other cash intensive segments, healthcare has huge margins, and the industry placement is such that they don’t see any challenge in monetization. He mentioned about the company’s mid-term plans to enable large scale transactions on its platform which he doesn’t think will be heavily discounted/incentivized. Listen in for more.