Healthcare startup AlternaCare raises $500K in seed funding

Wednesday September 07, 2016 , 2 min Read

Healthcare platform AlternaCare has raised $500,000 in seed funding from Eros Labs. The capital will be used to invest extensively in product development, strengthening the team, branding within their relevant target audience, and geographic expansion.

The platform, which was founded earlier this year, provides remote consultations to patients through both instant and scheduled options over multiple platforms, including phone, video calling, SMS and Whatsapp. Several value added services, like secure electronic health records, frictionless payments, and data access, are also provided.

The company had launched its product in April 2016, and claims to be already revenue positive.

“Using cloud telephony technology, we are India's first health-tech startup that has removed the dependency on the internet for doctor consultations as well as facilitating medicine delivery, lab tests, etc. Video call consultations with doctors are also supported on AlternaCare. The service also offers the feature to share their prescriptions' or affected area's images, which reach the doctors for their opinion instantly,” said Abhishek Dwivedi, Co-founder of AlternaCare.

Karan Bedi, CEO of Eros Labs, said that the startup has a unique model because of its ability to tap into all segments of the population and not be limited by access to the internet. He added that the growth over the last three months has also been quite strong.

Healthcare segment

The healthcare market in India is expected to grow at a CAGR of 22.9 percent, and the market size is expected to reach $280 billion by the year 2020. The digital healthcare market in India is valued at more than $1 billion, and is set to cross the $2 billion mark by 2020.

The healthcare segment has been quite sluggish in adapting advanced technology. The key players leading the segment include Practo, Lybrate, and Portea. Recently, one of the noteworthy rounds of funding in the field was received by NephroPlus, which bagged Rs 100 crore in its series C round led by SeaLink Capital Partners (SCP) and International Finance Corporation (IFC).

Some of the other early-stage funding rounds in this segment include those of healthcare analytics startup Tricog and Kolkata-based Tiyo.