Diagnostics startup Healthians raises Series A funding of $3 million in round led by BEENEXT

Healthians, the Delhi-based diagnostics and wellness healthcare marketplace, has raised Series A funding in a round led by BEENEXT, along with Digital Garage, Japan, BEENOS and others. This is the venture's second round of funding, having raised a seed round in July last year from YouWeCan Ventures.

The funds will be used for expanding to other cities, building technology to automate lab operations and creating products to monitor and manage customers' health using data.

The team aims to be India’s largest diagnostic brand by 2019. Speaking on this round of funding, Deepak Sahni, Founder and CEO of Healthians, said that their revenue is by far the highest among the entrants in the field, while still operating only in Delhi NCR. He added that in the last few months, they have been putting the operations and quality piece into processes by automating everything.

The platform brings together all the branded labs in one place. They work in close partnership with lab owners to help increase capacity utilisation, implement proprietary 52 point technology-led quality management system and upgrade to high-quality infrastructure.

They state that they are in the process of creating the country’s first and largest umbrella brand for high-quality end-to-end diagnostic service at a low price. The team claims that they receive over 30,000 bookings in a month.

Healthians has its own team of over 200 phlebotomists, and claims that they have conducted tests for over 150,000 customers in Delhi.

Speaking on the funding, Teruhide Sato, Founder and Managing Partner, BEENEXT, said that he had met the founders in November last year and invested a small amount. He decided to lead this round as the company started witnessing tremendous growth in all aspects.

In a press note released by the company, he said that he sees a real sustainable business being created.

“Diagnostics is a huge market in India and has room for many more players. Healthians' unique model, with a focus on quality, cost and customer experience, is highly scalable and expandable to other markets,” said Teruhide.

Anuj Mittal, Co-Founder, Healthians, added that with deep domain expertise, the team is creating technology that ensures accuracy across all aspects of diagnostics, from home collection to lab testing. He adds that ensuring reliability, accuracy and quality is the key to this.

The team provides a doorstep sample collection service through trained and certified team members and the transporting of samples to the nearest lab.

The future plans of the company include creating the largest umbrella brand in the country by adding over 200 labs and over 3,000 phlebotomists to its existing network across 30 cities over the next 12-18 months. The business aims to grow swiftly to achieve a 500,000 monthly sample load by the end of 2017.

The diagnostic market in India is an approximately $5 billion industry, with over a million tests being conducted daily, according to an IBEF 2015 study. While the scope of Healthians’ service is large, the business model is asset-light, with the hyper-local sample collectors and doctors being crowdsourced. Apart from preventive care, the site also caters to chronic patients and patients recommended tests by doctors.

Other players like the Sequoia and Tencent-backed Practo and Sequoia-backed 1mg are also entering the diagnostics market. Home-healthcare is also growing rapidly with players like Portea.

The team at Healthians aims to stay focused on diagnostics for another 12 months. They claim that they have built the necessary technology and have a road map for expanding their offerings towards other healthcare services in the future.

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