The March edition of Startup Saturday, Bangalore had Healthcare as the theme. The speakers included Rohit M A, (Director, The Cradle), Kesava Reddy, (CEO, Numo.in/Vaccimo.com), and Suryanarayanan A, (COO, NSRCEL, IIMB). The show was packed with audience and started with Rohit taking us through his journey with The Cradle.
While a hospital for child birth is not a new idea, what Rohit conjured up was something beyond a hospital. It was a place that you would cherish to go, and can have good memories associated with ‘the birth of a child‘. And this vision was transformed with the help of a number of doctors, planners and architects getting together to form a hospital plus five star facility. Every step taken by ‘The Cradle‘ showed innovation and execution. With things like handling medically critical deliveries to holding nappy changing competitions for daddies, the last 24 months have been quite a journey for the team. They claim to have achieved break-even with running costs in just six months of operation; in spite of having a five star facility they charge less compared to top hospitals. The team demonstrated a very clear vision for the future and has started futuristic courses titled M-B-A, which stands for ‘Management of Baby Affairs’! A visit to The Cradle is nothing less than a celebration associated with fond memories of the new member of the family.
Kesava Reddy talked about their latest venture, Vaccimo. They are a hospital-focused group who improve healthcare for patients by providing customized alerts for vaccinations, medical tests, medicine intake reminders and doctor visits, not just for humans but for pets as well. The services are paid for by the hospital. The idea is scalable to other areas as well and Numo.in is already trying it out in the field of education. Kesava also mentioned that this venture is a collaboration of many other startups – they have their web pages done by Netbrahma, for instance. They are working successfully with global healthcare companies, they say. In addition, they are successful in both urban and rural areas, with expansion plans in the latter space. There is a widespread acceptance of this idea amongst doctors and Kesava demonstrated the importance of having the confidence of customers, in this case, hospitals and doctors, while starting up.
The audience took active participation in these talks and the session saw great networking amongst entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs. The fact that Startup Saturday is spreading its coverage from technology centric editions to non-tech innovations as well got corroborated with the audience having folks from corporate legal areas, finance and services industries as well.
A Suryanarayanan, COO of the NS Raghavan Center for Entrepreneurship and Learning, IIM Banagalore, captivated the audience with his narration about serial startups, all in the healthcare domain. With over 25 years of experience in the healthcare domain, Surya is a free thinker and showed his ability to perceive consumer needs & emerging trends to opportunities and consequently to business models. In his words, ‘We need just one percent of India to be successful entrepreneurs and the GDP can easily be three-fold!”. In addition to his experiences, described, in detail, the incubation process at NSRCEL. The mentorship programs at NSRCEL, the characteristics of startups being incubated there, plus the procedures and legalities involved were discussed thoroughly.
Apart from the speakers, the March 09 edition of Startup Saturday Bangalore showed a synchronization of theme of speakers and audience, better audience interaction, variety in the audience with folks from legal to finance to IT to many more showing up, and coordinated event organization by volunteers.