Excl: Online doctor appointment booking platform Qikwell gets angel funding, close to raising more from SAIF Partners

Bangalore-based Qikwell Technologies Pvt Ltd, which runs an e-healthcare site allowing users to book appointments with doctors, is close to raising funding from multi-stage private investment firm SAIF Partners.

This comes after the firm roped in around half-a-dozen angel investors early this year, sources privy to the developments told Techcircle.in.

For more details on the investors and funding click here.

When contacted, Nitin Dubey, vice president (operations), Qikwell Technologies Pvt Ltd, said, "We wish to reserve our comments on this at the moment."

An e-mail query sent to Ravi Adusumalli, managing partner, SAIF Partners, did not elicit any response.

Established in 2011, Qikwell provides information on doctors, live information on doctor's availability, online appointment booking, delay/or schedule change notifications, etc.

Its network connects users to doctors in six cities—Bangalore, Chennai, Mysore, Vellore, Krishnagiri and Shimoga.

Qikwell was co-founded by Krishna Prasad Chitrapura and Raghavendra Prasad TS, both computer engineers from Bangalore University.

Chitrapura, who is also a IIT Bombay grad, has previously worked as software engineer at Novell besides having served at IBM Research. He was also senior scientist at Yahoo for almost six years before quitting to launch Qikwell.

Raghavendra Prasad, who has a string of patents to his credit, worked with Honeywell Technology for around 13 years before co-founding Qikwell.

SAIF Partners is a leading VC & PE firm, and manages over $1 billion of investments in India. It has a portfolio of over 30 companies including MakeMyTrip, JustDial, HomeShop18, One97 and BookMyShow.

Since January this year it has backed firms like Capitalfloat, an online financial services venture which helps SMEs get working capital, online test prep venture Topper, community portal Touchtalent and online travel related startup TravelTriangle.

There are several players in the online healthcare space which are positioned as platforms to help patients book appointments with doctors. Many of them have attracted funding.

Practo is backed by Sequoia Capital; Hyderabad-based DocSuggest raised money from Google India MD Rajan Anandan and Mumbai Angels member Taher Khorakiwala; Bangalore-based DocTree raised funding from S4 Holdings and ISB professor Siddharth Singh; Nexus Venture Partners recently invested $1.23 million in India- and US-based Lybrate Inc.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)