The SSHyd September edition was yet another blockbuster event. The theme was “Mobile apps/wearables for Healthcare”.
We had 6 participating startups sharing their learning and experiences in the healthcare domain, one Product demo, one expert speaker and one investor. The session was houseful and was pleasantly surprising to see so many startups from Hyderabad in healthcare sector. It is essential to note here that we could not even get in touch with a few known and well established startups due to lack of bandwidth. Just shows the kind of ecosystem the Hyderabad city is churning. We are also happy to share with everyone that Tamada media (Rahul, sneha and sadhvi) has covered our event and has agreed to do so in all future events as well.
First we had Mr. Rahul from DOCTRZ.com talking about his startup. Doctrz is a one stop solution for all those looking to manage their health records, receiving expert advice on healthcare, meet people with similar health profile and hassle free appointments, to name a few. They perform all this with the help of a mobile app and their target is to provide healthcare to all with low cost technology.
Next up was Mansi Gandhi from DOCTORC.in, a startup that is essentially an aggregator for various healthcare related laboratories, already having partnered with many labs across Hyderabad and as I am sharing this across with you guys, DoctorC has closed a Series A funding deal from a leading investor company. Their focus is on organizing this highly fragmented and unorganized sector, which is largely dependent on doctor’s preferred lab.
Third was Devraj from BumpDocs, a startup which is essentially a networking tool for pregnant women and also helps them connect with each other. They call themselves as the pregnancy private network. They enable this via a mobile app and are soon launching a wearable (claimed to be a world first for pregnant women) device that monitors the health of to-be mother and the child as well.
Next was InfocusRx, a startup by three young ladies, Hyntavi, Karishma and Tejasvi, with focus on suggesting/delivering contraceptives and educating the people about the importance of contraceptives and suggesting proper use of it. They have worked on pilot projects with leading healthcare companies and are definitely here to stay.
Dr. Ahlad from DOCTOREACH, (a doctor himself) spoke about the need for an innovative healthcare solution which could come in handy during a medical emergency. He mentioned about how we ignore certain symptoms and one of the main reasons being inaccessibility to emergency services at the right time (For example, a stomach ache in the middle of the night and we are caught unaware where to go and so we delay it for an early morning OP visit). He also mentioned how his focus is on directing the patient to the nearest hospital and his solution involves the participation of the doctors and the hospital staff. He has received positive feedback from a large medical community and is confident of making it big.
GasRelief.com, founded by Vijit Jain, hardly requires any introduction as the name is self-explanatory. Neverthless, Vijit aims to revolutionize the way we treat gastric problems. He uses a subscription based model and strictly recommends herbs and spices that are readily available at home, in the kitchen and are typically the “dadi maa ke nuskhe”. He believes that the Indian medical practice is very strong and well-articulated in the history books, with sufficient sample cases and proper solutions to almost all problems. His focus is to holistically treat the patient with focus on overall wellness and not just the problem.
We had Kiran from eKincare for a product demo. Kiran has his focus on maintaining the health records of an individual. They are in beta phase and have received tremendous response to their healthcare solution. Their focus is to simplify the maintenance of health to a level where the patient/user only has to know how to use a mobile camera, take a snapshot of the medical report/prescription, upload it and they will take care of the rest. (For those who are excited about this, they have freebies for those using their beta version and uploading even the smallest piece of prescription on their app)
The featured startup/expert for the day was Vikram from Nephroplus. This company is essentially India’s highest quality dialysis & top kidney care provider. They run a brick and mortar business unlike all other apps and wearables that dominated the session. Vikram shared his learnings about the difficulties in the Indian healthcare market, also highlighting how India is 29 Indias in itself with such diversity. Their main focus has been on quality and has carried out over 1,00,000 dialysis without a single infection till date. Whenever they open a dialysis centre in any city, they ensure that the doctor is investing atleast 10% of the setup cost. He believes this acts as a source of motivation for the practitioners thereby improving the overall quality. He also mentioned how choosy he was in selecting the investors and has asked every investor till-date to write-off the investment until they get the returns because of the very nature of the healthcare sector in India . The Nephroplus team has world renowned business and technology experts on-board and are on course to expanding multiple-folds over the next few years.
The investor talk was delivered by Mr. Nutan of Incessant Technologies. He expressed his interest in investing in the startups working on enterprise solutions in particular but was willing to hear ideas from other tech startups as well.
Overall, the session was fantastic. So much to learn from these fellow entrepreneurs, so little time. *sigh*. These guys are the rockstars of Hyderabad. So much activity in this city of pearls and we come to know of this only by organizing such a startup session.
I am extremely happy to share with all that the Startup Saturday Hyderabad has been growing consistently over the last 4-5 months and it is highly motivating to see the crowds coming in. I positively hope that we are soon forced to look for a larger place for gathering. We are already 900+ on Facebook and marching towards a 1000 followers. We do have repeat guests attending the session but it is also noteworthy that a large chunk of the populace is first-timers and that in essence sums up the Hyderabad startup ecosystem.
Thats all from the SSHYD team (Mr. Ramesh, Hamad and myself ) for the month of September 2014.
Special thanks to Manoj and Arpita for making the session a success!
Reported by:
Srikanth Soni
Headstart Volunteer and Startup Enthusiast