With COVID-19 spreading fast, this Delhi startup enables companies to check on their employees' health

With COVID-19 spreading rapidly across the globe, most employees are now working from home. But now, more than ever, companies are concerned about their employees’ health and safety. But all organisations can rely on is their employees informing them about their health, which may be a nuisance to them in the long run. What if there was a software that could gather data from fitness bands given to employees to create a live network of their health, which can enable the organisation to be proactive about their health?

This is what Mumbai and Delhi-based Rajeev Arora and Manu Grover embarked upon with their startup in March 2020.

"The thought of fighting an invisible enemy created a need for us to try and solve the problem of how we were going to navigate life through the near and foreseeable future. While scientists and virologists would eventually find a medical solution for this pandemic, there had to be a smarter way that normalcy could be achieved. It was this quest that led to the creation of San8ize," Rajeev Arora, Co-founder of San8ize, tells YourStory.

Rajeev has been part of the Mumbai Angels since 2009 and he is also the Managing Director of Paramount Wheels. Manu Grover is the founder of Healthgenie and is also the MD of GST Corporation. Both believe that AI can help in safeguarding and monitoring employee health. As most companies in India don’t keep a database of employee health,they decided to startup on the idea as soon as they heard about the pandemic.

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Starting up

The startup enables businesses to attain visibility, traceability, and enhances their ability to timely intervene using data and machine learning to make businesses and their employees pandemic proof.

"There are fragmented solutions being offered by a few companies, but none of them have been able to offer an end-to-end comprehensive data stack of employee health. We empower businesses to control their entire enterprise through a single dashboard with live data feeds of employee health thereby creating employee engagements, training, risk mitigation, tracking, traceability, and supplies of COVID-19 prevention merchandise through the best certified resources in India," says Rajeev.

The product works through the mobile app San8ize where corporates sign their employes and create curated feeds for training and to process restructuring solutions. The data of employees is geo-fenced and the fitness bands protected too.

The startup has engaged with a variety of industrialists and business owners – at least 15 pilot users – to ideate and understand their problems during this pandemic.

"Through the process of exploration, we realised that everyone we went to identify and discuss the problem with was an instant customer to our solution being built. Whether we spoke to restaurant owners, hospitality establishments, manufacturing sectors,or even to some of the largest BPO’s, they all had the same need to restart their business operations," says Rajeev.

Business model

The founders have invested Rs 50 lakh of their personal capital. They are in the process of closing their angel round of Rs 1.20 crore, and have received a soft commitment.

"We are a subscription-based solution with democratised and affordable pricing, which is available to potential customers on request. Our effort is to let big and small businesses leverage the technology we have built at a minimalistic cost so that they are not constrained by huge financial costs while restraining their businesses. The intent is to let our technology impact a large base of employees, hence, we are building a large customer base to distribute our solution" says Rajeev.

Challenges

The challenge for the startup over the last three months has been the lockdown. "We have been all working from homes and trying to build the business. Ideally, it would have improved our customer engagement had we been able to meet them face-to-face, but we have realised that people don't generally commit to contracts on virtual meetings," says Rajeev.

The other challenge for the startup has been the constant pace of the changes that they see in data being available during this pandemic, which means their engineering teams have to understand what each corporation requires.

Plans for the future

Their goal is to onboard at least 300 companies/150,000 employees (app downloads) in the first nine months of operations and then work with their investors to take this solution pan-India. Their long-term goal is to get to two million app downloads.

The product is currently pre-revenue and they have a target to achieve Rs 18 crore by the end of the 12 months post the commercial launch. The product competes with GOQii, Healthifyme, and Cult.