Which are the top funded startups and key investors in healthcare in India?

Based on data from Crunchbase on startups since 2010

Healthcare in India is on the cusp of transformation and aspiring entrepreneurs who are keen to build for India would find it useful to know what is the competitive landscape and who are key investors.

To satisfy my own curiosity and provide value to others, I pulled Crunchbase data* on India healthcare companies and analyzed it to answer two questions:

• What healthcare startups have attracted top funding

• Who are the active investors of healthcare in India?

Here's what I found (with data details in the end)...

What healthcare startups have attracted top funding?

These 37 companies are in the top 90%-ile of healthcare startups by total funding. They have raised between $17M to $652M in total funding. Seven of these have raised >$100M in total funding.

Top funded startups (founded since 2010). In increasing order by funding.

Who are the most active healthcare investors?

These 21 investors (out of 828 found) are the most active and have between 8 to 18 healthcare investments. Most (621) only have one healthcare investment but 6% of investors (50) have 5 or more investments in the healthcare category.

Most active investors by count of healthcare investments. In decreasing order by count of healthcare investments.

Which funders have invested in multiple top funded companies?

These eighteen investors are in the list of top five investors for multiple of the 37 top funded companies.

Investors of multiple top funded companies. In decreasing order of number of investments in top funded companies.

What other healthcare startups have attracted top funder 💰?

The 18 funders above have funded 30 additional companies. These 30 companies are tackling problems in the space of at-home fitness (Tread), health monitoring devices (Dozee), healthcare data analytics (The Healthy Billion), medical networking (Curofy), and pharmaceutical supply chain (Saveo).

Healthcare portfolio of 18 top funders. In increasing order by total funding.

My Take-aways

There are numerous top funded healthcare startups in India spanning diagnostics, telemedicine, virtual clinics, EMRs and it is worth understanding what problems they are solving and their strategy. Netmeds, 1mg and Pharmeasy all made recent headlines: Reliance took a majority stake in Netmeds, TATA acquired 1mg and Pharmeasy acquired Thyrocare. 

There's no dearth of healthcare investors in India. While most do not have deep healthcare investing experience, many investors have multiple healthcare investments. These are investors to discuss trends and gaps in the market with and know early while building.

There is an appetite for new healthcare businesses as evidenced by top investors funding healthcare companies in emerging categories and capital for healthcare companies increasing (in 2021, the median seed stage company raised a total of ~$1M up from $0.48M in 2018).

Questions for you

This was a brief overview and there's a lot I have left for another time. Still, I have some questions that I would love to know from you:

• Who are key funders or startups that I missed?

• Do you know any dedicated healthcare investors or firms?

• What are accelerators or incubators for healthcare startups in India?

If you have answers to any of these or want to discuss this post, I would love to hear from you!

Thanks to Shahed Alam, Aniruddh Jain, Natasha Ramanujan, and Sedi Worlanyo for reading drafts of this.

*Data is up to date as of May 12 2021. The dataset was a download of all companies headquartered in India and associated to healthcare category. Only the top five investors of a company were available in the dataset. Analysis was done on companies that were private and founded on or after 2010. Out of 3,286 companies, 2,173 were founded on or after 2010 and out of these 598 companies and 365 companies had investor and total funding data respectively.