India’s health startups have attracted crazy levels of investment, creating five unicorns in a year, with more to follow. HBI takes a closer look.

Click here to see the biggest healthcare operators in India, and here to see the biggest investors in Indian healthcare. 

The rise of telemedicine has been no surprise, but amongst the 5,295 health-tech startups, some have attracted such investment that the past year that they saw the creation of India’s first health related unicorns, quickly followed by another four.  The health-tech sector in India is suggested to reach in excess of $21bn by 2025 and of that $10.5bn will be ehealth, but, given the investment trajectory, even those estimates are conservative.

India’s first health-tech Unicorn Innovaccer has now reached a valuation of $3.2bn, yet last reported revenues are just $94m.  However, given the company has now moved their headquarters to the US and had a successful multinational roll out, their growth is inevitable. Pharmeasy shocked markets with a $5.6bn valuation, with talk of setting their sights on $9bn. With current revenues at $393m, it bought rival Medlife in May 2021 giving it a boost. Pristyn Care is the only health-tech start-up with a focus on physical health care as opposed to digital, but utilising tech in its approach to health care. In 2021 Pristyn had grown 5x and the company has aspirations to further that growth, from its current network of 150 clinics to 1,000.  But it’s the “soonicorns” that are the ones to keep an eye on, companies that have had the same or a similar amount of investment but haven’t quite got that billion dollar plus valuation as yet.

India’s enormous population with over 1.38bn people, coupled with one of the lowest number of doctors per person in the world, 0.9 doctor to every 1,000 inhabitants, has had a big impact on access to quality health care particularly in more rural areas. Whilst it may be difficult to find a doctor, over 40% of people have consistent internet access, 405.8 in every 1,000. So of course health-tech and ehealth would seem a natural fit in order to fill the gap, but our sources believe that health-tech alone will not help India; “it is only a true combination of digital and physical that will be truly sustainable”.

During the pandemic India saw a coordinated effort between private digital health companies and hospitals around India to offer a nationwide telemedicine platform for COVID care.  Many Hospital operators and primary healthcare providers are also providing integrated telehealth platforms, but these do not seem to be as exciting to investors as the health-tech start-ups that are making India unicorns right now.