Bengaluru-based healthcare startup Superhealth is building its hospital network around an operating model that places doctors on fixed salaries and standardises surgical pricing — a structure the company says is designed to reduce financial incentives tied to medical procedures.
Founder and CEO Varun Dubey told FE that the company’s approach focuses first on lowering hospital infrastructure costs, which he said often drive many of the financial incentives embedded in traditional private healthcare systems. Commissions are often seen as the problem, but they are really a symptom,” Dubey said. “If the cost structure of hospitals remains high, the system inevitably pushes toward revenue-linked incentives.”
Superhleath’s business model
Superhealth’s model centres on building lower-cost hospitals while eliminating procedure-linked commissions. Instead of purchasing land, the company signs long-term leases for entire buildings and uses prefabricated components along with digital building design tools to shorten construction timelines.
Dubey said this enables the company to build hospitals in about four months while keeping capital expenditure at roughly Rs 70–75 lakh per bed. By comparison, corporate hospitals in tier-I cities typically spend between Rs 2 crore and Rs 3 crore per bed, he said.
Each facility is designed as a standardised 50-bed hospital capable of handling between 30 and 40 surgeries a day.
Within this system, all doctors are full-time employees on fixed salaries and are offered employee stock ownership plans. The company does not pay commissions linked to surgical procedures, diagnostic tests, implants or patient referrals.
On the patient acquisition side
On the patient acquisition side, Superhealth offers an annual subscription priced at Rs 3,999 that covers four family members and includes unlimited consultations and diagnostic services. According to Dubey, the structure reduces incentives to convert outpatient consultations into hospital admissions. He said the company currently records an outpatient-to-inpatient conversion rate of about 5%, compared with an industry average of 10–12%.
“When financial incentives are removed from clinical decision-making, you see fewer surgeries being recommended,” he said. The company has also introduced a fixed-price programme called Supersurgery, under which the cost of a procedure is disclosed before admission and remains unchanged regardless of recovery duration or payment mode.
Superhealth currently operates a single 50-bed hospital in Bengaluru’s Koramangala and plans to add two to five more facilities in the city this year. To support its expansion, the company is in advanced discussions to raise about Rs 100 crore through a mix of equity and debt, sources said.
The sources said the round is likely to include structured debt and equity participation, and legacy hospital chain Apollo Hospitals is among those evaluating a potential investment in the startup. Investment bank Veda Corporate Advisors has been mandated to oversee the fundraising process.
Superhealth did not respond to queries regarding the proposed funding round or potential investor participation at the time of going to press. Prior to launch, the company had raised around Rs 17 crore from angel investors and secured about Rs 50–55 crore through debt and infrastructure financing arrangements, the sources said.
Early backers include Sparrow Capital, which led the seed round with a Rs 6 crore investment. Angel investors include Natasha M Oswal of Boundless Media, Endurance Technologies founder Anurag Jain and the family office of former cricketer MS Dhoni.
Dubey is joined in the venture by chief medical officer Alexander Kuruvilla, who previously held leadership roles at Apollo Hospitals, and chief operating officer Manoj Kumar, who was part of the founding team at healthcare platform Practo.