Yebhi co-founder’s medical tourism venture Hospals raises funding

Medical tourism venture Hospals has secured $1.5 million (Rs 10 crore) led by Japanese early-stage venture capital fund Spiral Ventures and incubation platform Venture Catalysts, a company statement said.

The company will use the capital to expand its operations across India, the Middle East and North Africa, the statement added.

“Cross-border healthcare is a $100-billion market globally, and India, the fastest-growing country in this space, is expected to generate $9 billion in revenues by 2020. That’s a huge opportunity, but the market is still very unorganised and disconnected. At Hospals, we’re combining technology and operations to build a one-stop shop for international patients,” said Danish Ahmed, co-founder of the company, in the statement.

Hospals Pvt. Ltd, which runs the venture, was founded in July 2018 by Ahmed, co-founder of fashion retail platform Yebhi.com, along with Obaidullah Junaid and Alok Kumar Singh. While Junaid is the founder of Al Shifa Healthcare Services, another player in the medical tourism sector, Singh is the former chief operating officer of the hospital.

After exiting Yebhi.com in early 2015, Ahmed founded an online-to-offline (O2O) retail venture called Shopsity, which in November 2016 got acquired by wallet firm Paytm to strengthen its offline retail network. Ahmed at that time moved to Paytm as vice president of its O2O business.

Hospals, which has expanded its services across the Commonwealth countries, currently manages close to 200 medical tourists visiting India and helps them choose hospitals, book doctor consultations and surgeries, buy medicines and also takes care of their accommodation and travel needs, the press note stated.

The venture was incubated at Delhi-based Technology 9 Labs, a startup studio funded by Spiral Ventures.

“With a multilingual, tailored mobile-technology based platform, Hospals has successfully created a solution which addresses the pain points in the healthcare ecosystem. Japanese corporates are extremely bullish to partner with healthcare companies in India and Spiral Ventures can facilitate possible partnerships,” said Yasuhiro Seo, partner at Spiral Ventures.

Mumbai-based Venture Catalysts was set up in December 2015 by Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, Anil Jain, Anuj Golecha and Gaurav Jain. It typically invests between $250,000 and $1 million in early-stage startups.

Its recent investments include bike sharing startup Mobycy, medical-technology startup iNICU, operating system maker PrimeOS, virtual trial room startup Try & Buy and more. Earlier this month, it facilitated the angel investment round in car wash startup CleanseCar.