IIM Ahmedabad invests in 2 healthcare startups
IIM Ahmedabad’s Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) has invested undisclosed amounts in two healthcare startups including Doux Dentistry, a dental care startup, and IoT-based Zeolr.
Doux Dentistry was founded by Dr Devaiah, a dentist with over 20 years of experience, and Vivek Madappa, a serial entrepreneur. It is currently present in Bengaluru, Pune, Mysore, and Ahmedabad under the brand name Mobident.
Mobident’s “Dental clinic in a Suitcase” is an asset-light model designed to address the core challenges of dental care industry such as end-user experience and high cost of dental services in India. It’s first-of-its-kind model is one-tenth the cost of setting up a new clinic and provides almost all the dental diagnostics and corrective procedures that are available in a dental clinic at the comfort of our own homes, offices, schools and hospital OPD’s.
Vivek Madappa, Co-founder of Mobident, said: ”CIIE offers a startup credibility, visibility, exposure, and excellent connections backed by investments. We are grateful to CIIE for giving us an orbit shifting platform.”
On the other hand, Zelor aims to develop solutions to aid in better management of chronic diseases by patients and availability of information to physicians for regular supervision, revision and reinforcement.
Zeolr’s flagship product - RespirON - is a comprehensive modern approach to help asthmatic and COPD patients as well as their physicians come up with the best plan for managing their conditions. It is a three-tier system that includes a device and an app connected to the cloud server that helps patients and physicians consistently monitor and manage their condition.
The Zeolr team consists of two passionate engineers, Roshit and Ajay, who began working on their dream venture right from college.
At present, CIE’s healthcare portfolio consists of nine startups across medical devices, e-health, health education and home care. These startups also receive strategic advisory and mentoring support from CIIE.
J Salim Vali, Vice President (Investments) of CIIE, said: “CIIE-IIMA is delighted to invest in Zeolr and Mobident. These companies have immense potential and we believe that their innovative ideas will play a key role in solving few critical healthcare issues. We believe that the combination of India's mettlesome entrepreneurs and CIIE will play a key role in solving many complex issues. ”
With Mobident, CIIE hopes to test the waters in the homecare innovation space and foray into more asset-light models that address key barriers in making healthcare ubiquitous, while Zeolr is poised to set in motion CIIE’s active involvement in Healthcare IoT.
Healthcare market
According to IBEF, the healthcare market in India was worth close to $100 billion as of 2015 and is expected to touch $280 billion by 2020, clocking a CAGR of 22.9 percent. Of the overall market, the healthcare delivery sub-segment accounts for 65 percent.
Recently, early-stage healthcare startups including Tiyo, Tricog, Cyclops Medtech and mobile-based platform DocsApp have secured funding.