Doctors networking app Curofy appoints former LimeRoad exec as product head

Gurgaon-based 911 India Healthcare Pvt. Ltd, which operates networking app for doctors Curofy, has appointed former LimeRoad executive Abhishek Sharma as vice president of products.

Sharma will be responsible for user experience, Curofy said in a statement. The appointment is likely to fast-track Curofy's monetization drive, it added.

An IIT-Delhi alumnus, Sharma earlier worked as the head of products at lifestyle products discovery platform LimeRoad. He was part of the founding members of the technology team at LimeRoad. Earlier, he had also dabbled with entrepreneurship with OfferBean, an online marketplace for consumer electronics.

Curofy was founded in February 2015 by IIT Delhi alumni Mudit Vijayvergiya, Pawan Gupta and Nipun Goyal. It's an app-only platform that allows doctors to interact and collaborate on cases, apply for jobs and read latest medical news. The startup's medical directory populates doctors' profiles based on public data. Curofy claims to have about 1,30,000 doctors from almost 800 cities on its platform.

In October last year, the company secured an undisclosed amount in its pre-Series A funding from US-based venture capital firm RoundGlass Partners. In 2014, it secured angel funding of roughly $160,000 from India Quotient, Spice Labs and a bunch of angel investors, at a reality television-type formatted event called TiE the Knot at TiEcon 2014, a conference organised by The Indus Entrepreneurs.

Curofy also said it has started pilot projects with healthcare providers and have taken on board drugmakers such as GlaxoSmithKline, Abbott and Sanofi. The company has also tied up with medical equipment maker Philips. However, Curofy did not divulge any details on these initiatives. The startup said it has started its pilots in the UAE, Lebanon, Turkey and Saudi Arabia to judge the market potential.

"These pilots will also help us in zeroing in on the best monetisation paths for us," said Gupta, Co-founder of Curofy.

The market for digital marketing of pharmaceutical products, medical devices, medical recruitment and medical content is expected to cross $1 billion (Rs 6,700 crore) in India by 2021, according to Curofy.

Curofy competes with other social networking ventures such as DocPlexus, PlexusMD and HealthKumbh for attracting doctors.

HealthKumbh raised Rs 50 lakh in seed funding from an Ahmedabad-based angel investor in February . PlexusMD raised funding from Patni family scion Arihant Patni and other investors in January while DocPlexus secured about $700,000 in seed funding from Uniqorn Ventures and Austria-based ASP Consulting in October last year.

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