Practo’s co-founder Abhinav Lal’s love affair with computers started in 1998 when his school in Jharkhand set up a computer lab. The time spent at the lab convinced him that a career in computers and mathematics was something up his street. But to his surprise, he couldn’t get into any good coaching institute for IIT entrance preparation. So, after grade 12, he chose the next best option available and took admission in NITK Surathkal in 2005. This is where he met Shashank ND, now co-founder and CEO of Practo.
In the first year of college, Lal and Shashank joined the entrepreneurship club ‘Euphoria’. The first activity that was organised by the club was a visit to the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, for an event where one of the key speakers was Ajit Balakrishnan, founder of Rediff. “We loved when he talked about building a product and a company,” Lal says. That led the duo to organise more such events.
In the process, they also understood the nuances of building a company from scratch. The college also had a club called NITK STEP that focused on fostering entrepreneurship and innovation among students. Lal and Shashank, both in their third year of B.Tech, and a bunch of friends started building products as part of this club in 2008. But, almost all of those products were “utter failures”. This was also the time the public market crash had happened.
Around this time, Shashank’s father had a surgery, for which he had to visit multiple doctors across multiple hospitals, exposing him to the huge gaps in the healthcare sector. Doctors were still using pen and paper to keep medical records, bills, etc. The founders saw an opportunity there, and, by the end of 2008, built a software that could help doctors manage their practices digitally, a platform which today people know as Practo. It was a cost-efficient cloud-based healthcare software that digitised and streamlined administrative tasks for healthcare providers, such as appointment scheduling, billing, and inventory management. The product was an instant hit.
However, the founders weren’t happy as they thought “it was a very badly built one”. In January 2009, they decided to rebuild it from the ground up. The newly-built software was showcased a few months later at a large dental conference in Bengaluru. The duo had worked 15-16 hours a day prepping for the event, but day one was a disaster as no one showed up.
But Lady Luck smiled the next day. A doctor bought it and 100 others showed interest in buying it. The next task Abhinav had was to convince his mother to allow him to do business. Once she agreed, the founders called a few of their friends to join in and started running Practo from Shashank’s house in JP Nagar, Bengaluru. This was in July 2009. The company was registered and named Practo by then. “The word Practo came from practice automation,” he explains. They also hired their first set of employees — students from their college and the RV College of Engineering. The next two years “were a blur” — making rounds to clinics, selling and improving the product and repeating it every single day. While Lal and two others wrote code, Shashank and the rest was out on the road — selling.
By the end of 2009, Practo had around 500 customers in Bengaluru and created a simple expansion strategy. One person from the team would move to a city, sell the product, and if it worked, he would set up a small team there. Then the next person would go to the next city. So on and so forth.
Within no time, Practo expanded to Chennai and Mumbai. By 2010, they had roughly 1,500-2,000 customers. Today, close to 85% of its revenues come from India business and the rest from international markets, where it has been providing software to hospitals and clinics for 10+ years and recently launched its doctor discovery marketplace platform in the UAE.
Practo was bootstrapped till 2011. Before that, it was part of Morpheus Accelerator, through which it met a bunch of investors. In 2012, it raised its first funding of `25 crore from Sequoia. “We still have the screenshot of a bank account showing the newly infused money.” The firm has raised a total of $228.85 million in funding across six funding rounds to date.
By 2012, Practo had 30 employees and 10,000 customers (doctors). They had reached the point where they could build what they originally wanted to — a consumer-facing app. After they got doctors online, made them use technology and open up their calendars, it was time to make healthcare better for consumers. “The last 10 years have all been about plugging the gaps.”
Today, Practo’s B2B vertical focuses on software solutions for hospitals and clinics, while B2C offers doctor discovery and appointment booking for minor to major ailments, 24×7 online consultations, along with subscription-based health plans.
The PeakXV-backed digital healthcare company is looking to go public soon and reported its first full-year profit in FY25, driven by 25–30% Y-o-Y growth in its core business.