This healthtech startup is using AI to standardise India’s chaotic medical records
Bengaluru-based healthtech startup Eka Care is tapping AI to simplify documentation, store digital records, streamline patient management, and improve medical outcomes.
In 2020, while building his hackathon project that would ultimately become Aarogya Setu, Vikalp Sahni realised India’s digital health journey was still in the embryonic stage. At the onset of 2021, the ex-CTO and Co-founder of travel platform Goibibo founded , a healthtech platform to standardise the archives of Indian medical history.
Started as among the first companies to provide free COVID-19 digital consultations, the platform now offers a range of features, including patient management systems and AI-enabled clinical documentation. The nearly 100-member team, based in Bengaluru, has onboarded almost 65,000 doctors who serve about 18 million users.
“The COVID-19 era was an inspiration and fuelled the motivation to build AI-powered health and clinical data solutions. I wanted to build something to store medical records, something doctors could leverage for better outcomes,” the Founder and CEO tells YourStory. The founding team also includes Co-founder and COO Deepak Tuli.
Tech-enabling healthcare
Sahni projects Eka Care as an OpenAI or Claude for the Indian healthcare system. At the backend, it has a deep Application Programming Interface (API) platform, which acts as a bridge between multiple software.
The startup uses generative AI to automate clinical documentation and extract key health indicators from patient interactions, enabling doctors to spend more time on diagnosis and preventive care.
“This helps in early detection and continuous management of chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension across large patient populations,” says Sahni.
“Software like the Samsung Health App and Medanta App are integrated with its API. On top of that, we use a mix of in-house AI models (called Parrotlet) and Amazon Web Services (AWS), like Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Transcribe,” he shares with YourStory.
The seasoned entrepreneur adds that rather than just using wrappers to encapsulate another piece of code, the team has built a custom AI stack specifically for Indian healthcare.
The primary services of Eka Care are Eka Doc and Eka Scribe. The former helps doctors manage their end-to-end paperwork, including maintaining patient records, digital prescriptions and billing, among other things. The latter is an AI-powered voice assistant tool that can automatically transcribe a doctor-patient conversation and create structured notes.
Eka Care’s AI models parse unstructured data—such as voice notes, prescriptions, and lab reports—into structured, interoperable formats.
“This data is then analysed to surface patient-level insights, population health trends, and clinical decision support cues that drive more informed and timely medical interventions,” Sahni explains.
“On the patient’s side, our app—available in 12 languages—is an Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission-compliant personal health record app where they can seamlessly upload their family’s medical history. However, this is more to showcase our APIs; our primary monetisation comes from Eka Doc and Eka Scribe,” he says.
The services are rolled out in subscription models costing either $12 per month or $100 per year for Eka Doc and $20–$25 per month (depending on usage) for Eka Scribe.
The startup’s research found that doctors tend to sign up for the free model and eventually join the premium subscription. Of the 65,000 doctors on board, about 12,000 use the paid model.
“85% of those paid users avail our premium services (create prescriptions for patients), and the rest only pay to maintain a patient directory,” Sahni says.
The startup aims to onboard one lakh paid doctors and about 30 million users over the next couple of years. It plans to accelerate growth by scaling its technology and expanding to other countries.
Sectoral perspective and funding
The CEO believes that the health sector is severely underserved and hasn’t seen much technological evolution, unlike the ecommerce or fintech sectors. While Electronic Medical Record (EMR) solutions are emerging, Sahni says the road to digitising healthcare is long.
“From a healthtech standpoint, AI can actually change the game for healthcare. Many of the new AI-led companies will spearhead this revolution. However, we need to keep in mind that there is still a doctor-patient relationship at its heart, not limited to one transaction. So, there is more complexity,” he says.
Eka Care recently launched an open-source AI evaluation framework called KARMA-OpenMedEvalKit, which can evaluate clinical AI models in India.
It also started the Ekathon hackathon in collaboration with AWS this year. The event was held on June 5 and 6 in Bengaluru and brought together innovators to tackle real healthcare challenges. Over 75 teams submitted ideas, with 15 finalists competing live to showcase their solutions.
“The idea was to showcase to developers that Indian sovereign models, which are fine-tuned for Indian health systems, perform much better. Ekathon serves two purposes. One is to build innovation in healthcare, and the second is to showcase our API platform, which is much better at benchmarking the Indian health sector than the other models,” he says.
Eka Care has raised multiple funding rounds since its founding—$4.5 million in a seed round led by 3one4Capital in 2021 and $15 million in a Series A round led by Hummingbird Ventures in 2022. The company generates about $3 million in yearly revenue.
It competes with companies like Bengaluru-based HealthPlix and PharmEasy’s Docon. But Sahni says the healthtech startup stands out from its competition.
“Unlike Practo, which mainly focuses on appointments, teleconsultations, and clinic management, Eka Care focuses on AI-powered clinical documentation and Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission-linked digital health records for both doctors and patients. HealthPlix is primarily an EMR for outpatient practice.”
He adds that soon India will have its own EMR and scribe players, and the startup “would like to be one of them and generate over $30 million in revenue by 2028”.
The Indian digital health industry stood at about $14.5 billion in 2024 and is projected to increase to $106.97 billion by 2033. Sahni says the industry is entering a high-growth phase, driven by rising smartphone adoption, expanding health awareness, and government-led digitisation initiatives.
“The growing demand for accessible, affordable, and data-driven healthcare is further accelerating innovation across platforms and services. As digital health matures, it is poised to play a central role in strengthening India’s overall healthcare delivery landscape.”