10 million people in India using Practo healthcare startup
With 10 million people in India using this healthcare startup’s search engine each month, Practo is just on the cusp of hitting the bigtime. The company is a kind of cross between Google and Uber, where they have two offerings: the public can search for doctors and healthcare providers; and the company offers a SaaS product, Practo Ray, as a practice management tool for healthcare professionals.
Like a lot of fledgling startups Practo was born out of frustration. Founder N.D. Shashank found himself wanting a second opinion on his father’s upcoming knee surgery, and with no digital records to share between healthcare professionals he annoyingly had to take pictures of the paper records and send them to a consultant based in the U.S.
The problem presented an opportunity, and Shashank went on to create an online “health account” that he could access and share with multiple doctors and specialists.
The next step was to build Practo Ray, which for a monthly fee allows doctors to access the cloud based clinic-management software. Following a $4 million investment from Sequoia Capital, Shashank and co-founder Abhinav Lal established the second service offered by Practo, a consumer focused search engine.
Practo Search, which can be accessed via the web or mobile app and allows users to search for doctors or specialists, even filtering results based on further parameters such as experience, location, and appointment times.
Now the company has the concurrent revenue streams, with the recurring payments from the SaaS product, and the Search facility becoming increasingly attractive place for facilities to advertise.
With Prato’s Series B and C funding raising an additional further $120 million in funding during 2015, this year should be the year the company can really take flight and transform the way healthcare connects and serves users and professionals in India.
www.practo.com
