Doctor appointment booking site Qikwell raises $3M from SAIF

Bangalore-based Qikwell Technologies Pvt Ltd, the company behind the online doctor appointment platform Qikwell, has secured $3 million (over Rs 18 crore) in funding from multi-stage private investment firm SAIF Partners, according to a report by The Economic Times, quoting its co-founder Raghavendra Prasad.

We have contacted the company for more details, and will update the story as and when we hear from it.

In September, VCCircle had first reported that Qikwell was close to raising $3 million from SAIF.

The startup had earlier raised under $200,000 in two tranches from a clutch of investors including Alok Mittal of Canaan Partners, Sunil Kalra of Indian Angel Network, Bhupender Singh, Sujatha V Kumar and Amit Somani.

Qikwell was established in 2011 by Krishna Prasad and Raghavendra Prasad (not related) - both computer engineers from Bangalore University. Krishna, who is also an IIT Bombay grad, 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.

Qikwell provides information on doctors, live information on doctor's availability, online appointment booking, delay/or schedule change notifications, etc. Users can also view doctor's availability live, book instant appointments, view appointment status and get alerts in case of delays. Its network connects users to doctors in six cities—Bangalore, Chennai, Mysore, Vellore, Krishnagiri and Shimoga.

SAIF Partners is a 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)