[Funding alert] Myntra co-founder’s startup mfine raises $17.2 M in Series B funding

Healthcare startup, mfine on Tuesday announced that it has raised $17.2 million as a part of its Series B funding round led by Japan-based venture capital firm, SBI Investment. Global venture capital firm BEENEXT also participated in the round alongside existing investors, Stellaris Venture Partners and Prime Venture Partners. 

The company stated that it will be using the funds for scaling the service across the country.  With this investment, mfine is looking to grow its virtual hospitals network and services across primary care, secondary care and chronic care management.

In the next 12 months, the startup aims to bring together India's top 250 hospitals on its platform, from 10 cities, and getting more than 2,500 doctors onto its virtual hospital network. The company will be tripling its investments in AI, mobile engineering, and hardware integration.

Co-founder Prasad Kompalli told YourStory, that over the past few months the platform has been piloting medicine delivery services to customers, which acts as an additional monetisation stream for the platform.

The company at present has an in-house delivery staff of 20 people delivering across Bengaluru and part of Hyderabad. The current investment will also be used to take the count of its delivery staff to 150 members, this year.  

Further, this delivery staff won’t be leveraged for just medicine delivery but also for home sample collections.

Founded in February of 2017 by Myntra co-founder Ashutosh Lawania and former business head at Myntra Prasad Kompalli, mfine is an on-demand healthcare service that allows users to consult with doctors from premium healthcare institutions through a video, or a chat.

Including the current funding round, the startup has raised over $24 million and has 200 employees in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, at present.

Earlier in May, last year, the company raised $4.2 million as a part of its Series A funding in a round led by Prime Venture Partners, along with participation from existing investors, Stellaris Venture Partners.

Until now, over 100,000 customers have consulted on mfine in the last 15 months and the startup claims that its customer base is growing at 30 percent month over month.

Speaking on the investment, Prasad Kompalli, CEO and cofounder, mfine, said,

“The consumer traction proves that our model works and with this investment we want to scale the service across the country. We are delighted to have SBI and BEENEXT on board as they share our vision of providing quality healthcare on-demand using AI and mobile tech. We see in them long term partners, in building one of the largest healthcare platforms in the world.”

The company also claims that more than 500 doctors, from over 100 hospitals practice across 20 specialties on mfine. Further, the startup has served over 800 towns in India.

While, Tomoyuki Nii, Executive Officer of SBI Investment, said,

“mfine's AI healthcare delivery platform has the potential to bring in huge transformation in the Indian healthcare system where quality doctors are far and few and access to quality is limited. With an on-demand model and state-of-the-art AI and mobile tech, mfine stood out for us with great potential to deliver large scale impact in healthcare delivery in India.”

With the growth, the company is also looking to facilitate 150,000 consultations per month, over the course of next year.

Teru Sato, Founder & Managing Partner, BEENEXT commented,

“The application of AI to help deliver large-scale impact in delivering healthcare is game changing. mfine has a very strong team with the founders having deep technical knowledge and with the right vision and business model for building a large impactful business in India’s healthcare sector. We will continue to support companies like mfine in India."

Also read: Myntra co-founder finds his mojo in healthcare; raises $4.2M in Series A for mfine

How does it work? 

When compared to competition, mfine follows a unique model of partnering with leading and trusted hospitals, instead of aggregating individual doctors on its platform. Hospital partnerships enable mfine to make high quality care of trusted doctors available on a digital channel.

For the hospitals, mfine offers its cloud offering, and acts as a business channel bringing in more patients and offering premium services, long-term care programs, super specialties without any upfront investments to a larger set of patients virtually.

Also, specialist doctors from these hospitals are assisted by mfine’s AI system, helping them improving their efficiency and effectiveness.

Further, mfine’s internal care team houses more than 60 doctors and is working alongside the AI system offering the best possible diagnosis and care.