i2India, which is backed by the innovation subsidiary of Imperial College of UK and supported by domestic investors like Tata Sons, is working on two-three more such healthcare initiatives
Start-up incubator Venture Factory, promoted by i2India, is betting big on healthcare start-up sector. Among its recent investments is a unique initiative called HealthSetu that aims to link doctors sitting in cities with patients in remote rural areas.
i2India, which is backed by the innovation subsidiary of Imperial College of UK and supported by domestic investors like Tata Sons, is working on two-three more such healthcare initiatives, its partner Anup Viswanathan told dna. "We have just funded an ambitious start-up that aims to provide healthcare to a billion people, called HealthSetu. The project started off with an aim to provide healthcare content in regional languages. We have now created a platform which is an on-line to off-line solution where people located in remote rural areas can interact with reliable doctors in cities," Anup said.
This service is based on revenue model and about 20 pilots are being run in remote villages of Bihar and UP and patients there are being catered to by doctors sitting in Delhi and Lucknow. With less than 20% of the rural population being able to consume content in English, there is a vast unmet demand for information on common ailments like diabetes to everything else in mother tongue, which is being met by healthsetu.com. Anup did not disclose i2's exact investment in HealthSetu but indicated the figure is around its average investment of Rs 3 crore.
"We invest about Rs 3-3.5 crore in each of our ventures over a period." Investment in the start-up is part of Venture Factory's incubation and accelerator programme for healthcare start-ups announced earlier.
"We are supporting two-three more such healthcare initiatives, which are a little too early to talk about," he said. Initial investments are low as i2 comes in at the ideation stage itself.
"We are not exactly a venture capitalist but a venture builder coming at the ideation stage itself and start working from the day zero. In each of these three examples, we have explored several alternative ideas," he said. Apart from these start-ups in the healthcare sector, Bangalore-based i2India's success stories include Green Power Systems and Shippr Technologies. "Green Power Systems is a start-up which is a waste-to-energy convertor, converting kitchen waste generated in places like Infosys canteen into cooking gas and even exporting their technology to countries like Germany and US."
Shippr is the Uber for commercial vehicles for intra-city transport where i2 came in about year-and-a-half ago. "They are now in four cities – Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai and Delhi – in this time span and work with all large customers like Flipkart, Amazon, DHL, Delhivery and others," he said. Both these start-ups are making profits both at the operating as well as the bottomline level.
These apart, Venture Factory has invested in ZenParent.in that is building an online community of parents, i2play Interactive that creates gamified learning and geo-tracking start-up Tsepak among others.
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