While the initial years of health tech investment saw money flowing into startups in online pharmacy, diagnostics, and digital health insurance, investors are slowly moving focus beyond it. Areas such as cross-border tech providers for the healthcare industry abroad and single-specialty healthcare where platforms offer services and products for end-to-end needs of patients suffering from chronic diseases such as diabetes or obesity, are gaining investor interest.
“A part of our thesis is a vertically integrated single specialty, which includes doctor appointments, care plans, coaching, D2C products for that disease area, medication, diagnostic, etc. It allows you to capture the complete lifetime value of the patient, and create clinically-backed care delivery models that lead to impact and outcomes,” said Namit Chugh, Partner at W Health Ventures, which has started to raise its second fund and targets about $100 million.
Of the $7.6 billion raised by Indian startups till September this year, only about $931 million were invested in health-tech startups across 113 rounds, according to data from Tracxn. Among the large deals in this sector recently, AI-led health-tech startup Qure.ai, which is a medical imaging AI partner to hospitals and healthcare organisations globally, raised $65 million in a Series D funding round.
Besides this, insurance startup Acko acquired digital chronic care management startup OneCare for an undisclosed amount in July.
Besides these, the fund is also looking for opportunities in clinical process outsourcing and clinical trials. “A lot of outsourcing happens in terms of nurses from India going and serving at hospitals abroad. We are looking to see if there is an opportunity to build something there. Besides, lots of administrative front office and middle office tasks in US hospitals and clinics can be outsourced to India,” Chugh added.
The fund has been investing since 2021 from its $100-million Fund I in startups such as BeatO, which is a personalised diabetes management platform, Mylo, which runs a parenting community, AI-guided mental health platform Wysa, and Reveal Healthtech, which provides AI and engineering services to the healthcare industry, among others.
