Online marketplace Healthians to raise $6-7 m

Online healthcare marketplace Healthians.com is all set to raise $6-7 million from new and existing investors, including cricketer Yuvraj Singh’s YouWeCan Ventures, in the next two months.

The New Delhi-based start-up helps users find the right health check-up from a range of diagnostic laboratory chains present on its platform, at affordable prices.

Every lab or hospital has differential pricing that could be as high as 100-150 per cent. However, prices are mainly affected by two major reasons – one being intermediaries and referral fee, and the second being high marketing costs incurred by the labs to reach out to these patients.

Healthians is trying to offer price standardisation, transparency and better experience to its consumers through its branded network of diagnostic labs.

The company targets to form a network of over 1,000 Healthians-branded labs in about 20 cities such as Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Pune.

These diagnostic labs are small centres, with one or two outlets in a particular area, which find it difficult to compete with bigger players like Suburban Diagnostics, Metropolis and Dr Lal Pathlabs.

Deepak Sahni, CEO and founder of Healthians.com, said, “Our vision is to give our customers a trusted choice along with ease, convenience, transparency and affordability, when it comes to booking a diagnostic test. We were able to find the gaps and created a solution through Healthians Network Labs that is in the best interest of patients as well as the labs.” 

The start-up also plans to help these smaller non-branded labs by creating trust and transparency for patients, as well as higher capacity utilisation, thus helping them reduce costs and depart better services.

According to Sahni there are about 100,000 such diagnostic laboratories across the country. Out of these, 72 per cent offer pathology services and the rest provide radiology and imaging such as MRI, CT scan X-ray and ultrasound.

He further added that the segment is largely fragmented with over 85% per cent of the market dominated by small labs. They function in a particular area and have limited reach; these are also differentiated as non-accredited Labs.

Many of these labs have machines and equipment that is at par with the larger players in the industry, however, some of them don’t have budgets or do not fit in the criteria of accreditation bodies.

The company is currently focused in Delhi-NCR, and caters to customers in 22 cities in India. The company plans to profile over 1 million users for HealthiansPLUS, crowd source over 1,000 mobile Health Advisors, and conduct more than 200,000 tests in the next 8 to 12 months.