K Ganesh's Portea Medical raises $8M from Accel Partners & Ventureast, eyes acquisitions

Portea Medical Pvt Ltd, a provider of in-home healthcare services in India, has secured Rs 48 crore ($8 million) from Accel Partners and Ventureast. According to Portea chairman K Ganesh, the company is in preliminary talks to acquire a few service providers operating in the healthcare space.

Although Ganesh declined to share further details related to funding, a source close to the development told VCCircle that the VC firms put in $4 million each for a total of 30 per cent stake.

As part of the deal, Mahendran Balachandran, partner at Accel Partners, and Venkatadri Bobba, general partner at Ventureast, will join Portea's board of directors.

"Portea is a technology-enabled company. So, the biggest chunk of the capital will be used for developing the technology, which we have already started. This technology will be used to run the operations and also to ensure quality as we scale up," said Ganesh, who along with his entrepreneur wife Meena acquired Portea in July this year. "We are evaluating multiple Bluetooth-enabled devices to provide better services to our customers. Our idea is to be able to provide proactive medicines by using technology and medical devices," he said.

Days before this acquisition, VCCircle had reported that the couple—best known for setting up the education-cum-consumer internet services firm TutorVista Global Pvt Ltd and selling it to the UK-based Pearson Plc in a $213 million deal—was close to raising $10 million for their new venture in the primary healthcare space.

With 150 employees on board, Portea is already providing services in Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai and Mumbai. It is now looking to expand to top 10 cities, including Hyderabad and Pune in 12 months.

Portea provides healthcare at customers' homes through doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, nutritionists and counselors. It has five tier-1 corporate hospitals as partners and a network of hundreds of referring physicians all over India, and handles around 2,000 home visits a month.

Individuals registered with Portea will receive up to two in-home visits a month from its healthcare team at Rs 100-200 per month. Other services include in-home prescriptions and home delivery of medicines, access to the company's network of specialists (if required), electronic patient records and regular status reports via e-mail.

Krishnan and Meena are serial entrepreneurs and strategic investors who have successfully started and exited four companies. The couple's first venture, IT&T, was acquired by iGATE while the second initiative, Customer Asset, was bought by FirstSource (erstwhile ICICI OneSource). The third venture, called Marketics, was sold to WNS and the fourth one, TutorVista, was acquired by the British media group Pearson.

The husband-wife duo has also incubated and invested in six companies so far. These include online travel guide Mustseeindia.com, online bookstore BookAdda.com, food delivery service Delyver.com, jewellery e-shop BlueStone.com, e-grocery firm BigBasket.com and online 'prasad' delivery service OnlinePrasad.com.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)