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Anthill Partner, Devang Mehta’s views on how Healthtech startups have a seminal opportunity in aiding and facilitating the vaccination drive in India.

Covid clearly has dramatically impacted, in a largely negative way, economic activity across India. We have seen literally every sector (including Healthcare, where I am actively involved with startups) get blindsided by the sudden and ravaging impacts of the pandemic. However, true to the saying, every cloud has a silver lining, and in every crisis lies an opportunity. Healthtech startups have a seminal opportunity in aiding and facilitating the vaccination drive in India. Plenty of opportunities will be in healthcare IT, logistics, connecting various datasets, social networks for trusted information sharing, and in areas related to these.

IT systems (and accompanying apps) will play a central role in creating and maintaining information related to vaccinations: enlisting and enumerating people for vaccination, keeping track of the progression of dose intake during the process, as well as using national IDs like PAN and Aadhar to uniquely identify individuals and their participation drive. This, firstly, will ensure, that priority doses are delivered to the most vulnerable and critical sections of the population. Second, combined with mapping applications (and the policies around these have been greatly liberalized as I write this piece), startups will ensure that a coordinated vaccination campaign will harmonize the needs of herd immunity with geospatial data; and will further, through the use of data interfaces and connectors, will synchronize with information on people with co-morbid conditions and other data pertinent to assessing the risk to Covid.

IT could play a very important role in ensuring the genuineness of vaccines and quickly detecting and flagging counterfeit. This could easily span the entire gamut of the security apparatus: detecting counterfeits, preventing their use in patients, helping track the source of aberrant activity, and using social media as well as traditional news sources to alert the larger population to the dangers posed by fraudulent doses.

Startups can also play a central role in fine-tuning the logistics inherent in the seamless delivery of vaccinations across the country. The logistics space in India has undergone tremendous innovation on account of businesses widely adopting deep technology tools to address transport challenges. A much-quoted Economic Survey predicts this logistics space to grow to a staggering $215 Billion by 2020. The IP and best practices built as a result of the growth in this space can easily be leveraged to ensure seamless and efficient delivery of vaccinations to every nook and corner of India in a timely manner. Layers of AI/ML could predict when vaccines would run out of a certain center, city, or state and reinforcements could be ordered in a timely fashion.

Startups can, and most likely will, help engender a lot of social and information sharing activity as the vaccination drive begins in full gusto.

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Find out more at financialexpress.com.

Devang Mehta, Partner, Anthill Ventures, gives his insights on the tremendous and constantly evolving potential of Health-tech and how it is emerging as an exciting opportunity for Start-ups

Covid has evangelised the collective mind-set of the masses towards healthier living. This mind-set includes continuously building immunity, improving sanitation, pre-empting disease, and generally, ensuring a perennially healthy lifestyle. The healthcare industry has proven to be one of the key drivers contributing to the growth of the country and is further estimated to become one of India’s most successful industries with respect to revenue generation and employment rate.

Consequently, a lot of downstream activity and thinking emerges regular check-ups, holistic wellness approaches (specifically at the intersection of Yoga, Ayurveda, and modern health), ubiquitous availability of personalised health information on health vitals to doctors and loved ones, natural availability of remote health, contactless living and more.

This milieu translates into a socio-economic environment where the broad populations will want to be screened and alerted to the presence of chronic diseases (or virtually ailment) as part of regular check-ups. They will want to be presented with an array of personalized treatment options in synch with unique individual characteristic and lifestyles. There will be constant pressure to make tests minimally invasive, frictionless, and breezy- as an example, personalised screening for cancer and specific cancers through newer biomarkers like sputum, and breath. There will be a constant demand for results and pointers to remedial action to be continually available on mobile devices. For customised neutraceuticals diets to support the recovery process and prevent remission. The progression in technology and the growth of forever-aware IoT devices has been a great help to relay information to doctors at any and every given point, 24×7 and quickly catch the disease’s onset and remission.

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Find out more at entrepreneur.com.

In a conversation with YourStory, Devang Mehta, Partner, Anthill Ventures; and Anjali Ajaikumar, VP Strategy and Quality, HCG; spoke about healthcare accelerator Lumos.

The coronavirus pandemic has changed the way we view healthcare. Telemedicine, where doctors consult patients remotely by means of telecommunications technology, has seen unprecedented growth during the pandemic. According to media reports, the doctor-patient ratio in India is one per 1,457 Indian citizens; while in rural areas alone, the ratio is as low as one doctor per 25,000 citizens. But telemedicine has brought in the much-needed access. According to IBEF, the demand for online healthcare market is expected to be around $372 billion by 2022. The market size was around $160 billion last year.  To help startups with technical and business advisory in the healthcare segment, VC firm Anthill Ventures joined hands with Healthcare Global Enterprises (HCG), one of the largest oncology chains in India, to start Lumos Health in November 2020. Lumos is a India/Singapore-based healthcare accelerator providing advisory to early-stage companies in the healthcare industry and propel them to newer growth trajectories. Its main focus is on oncology and adjacencies.  In a conversation with YourStory, Devang Mehta, Partner at Anthill Ventures, and Anjali Ajaikumar, VP Strategy and Quality, HCG, spoke about the core vision and the plans of the accelerator. As the founding member, Devang is involved in all key strategic and operational aspects of Lumos Health. He comes with over 20 years of operational experience in early- and mid-stage companies in the US, and has been instrumental in scaling multiple early stage healthtech startups.  Having learned the ropes of the workings of a hospital right from scratch, Anjali heads strategic growth planning and quality implementation for the entire HCG network. Anjali spearheaded Lumos Health at HCG by creating processes that ease the startup journey and help startups scale with speed through mentoring, revenue growth, etc. 

YourStory (YS): Why did you feel there was a need for an incubator and what gap does it solve?

Anjali Ajaikumar (AA): Startups need varied and comprehensive advisory services, in addition to capital, to hit notable growth strides in early stages of evolution. Lumos provides powerful, comprehensive, eclectic and timely interventions to enable startups to achieve rapid growth. Sign up for our exclusive newsletters. Subscribe to check out our popular newsletters. For startups from overseas, this accelerator assists in India markets entry, go-to-market entry and connections to the local industry to facilitate easy expansion.

YS: What is the key vision of Lumos?

DM: We intend to give startups all the tools and support needed to achieve business goals – profitability, future rounds of funding, getting noticed by bigger players for M&A, and so on.  We also want to be regarded as the premier healthcare accelerator in India for startups that are defining the frontiers of next-gen innovation.

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Find out more at yourstory.com.

The government’s healthtech agency worked with a local startup to adapt a commercial wound-scanning device, as the city stepped up measures against COVID-19.

Singapore has launched an AI tool to automate temperature screenings, developed by its healthtech agency IHiS and a local startup called Kronikare.

“IHiS and Kronikare co-created the iThermo solution in two weeks. It is being piloted now and the results are encouraging,” said Bruce Liang, CEO of IHiS.

It launched this week, as Singapore saw snaking queues for temperature screenings to enter office buildings. The government has asked businesses and building managers to step up measures, after it raised the COVID-19 infection alert to the second highest level last Friday. The total number of confirmed cases in Singapore stands at 58, with no deaths registered.

The device offers a quicker and safer alternative to manual forehead thermometers, currently the most popular option. It scans people’s temperature as they walk by and alerts staff to those with higher temperatures. Visitors wouldn’t have to stop to be measured. It’s also safer for frontline staff as they are less likely to come in contact with people with undetected infections, and needs one or two people to operate.

iThermo has been used at IHiS’ office and St. Andrew’s Community Hospital to scan visitors and staff since early this week. It’s now commercially available as a pilot device for S$1,000 per month and has been certified as a Class A medical device by the Health Sciences Authority on 3 February.

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Find out more here.

Devang speaks extensively about the early stage ecosystem in this Series of Masterclass videos. He talks about his investing experience, how funding decisions are made, and on a lot of related topics.

To find out more, visit the Speakin Network channel on Youtube.

The five-week program will be focusing on key aspects in the growth of startups

Bengaluru-based venture capital fund Chiratae Ventures on Wednesday announced the names of the startups selected in the seventh edition of its Innovators Program. The program witnessed participation from over 500 homegrown startups for their five-week foundational initiative which seeks to empower seed and early-stage founders.

The selected startups represent a wide range of industries, including consumer tech, software, healthtech, deeptech, and fintech. The first 19 startups selected through the program are AyuRythm, Inspektlabs, Quollab, Euphotic Labs Pvt Ltd (Nosh), Chainflux, VogueMe Technologies Pvt Ltd (Toch.ai), Code Test Pvt Ltd (CodeTest), PhySarum, Vyorius Drones LLP (Vyorius), Zealth, Heyy.life, Ai Health Highway India Pvt Ltd (AiSteth), Rightbot Private Limited, Retail Pulse, Mowito, Whrrl, Escrowpay, Insurance Samadhan, and Ark Neo Finance.

“Our Innovators Program is rooted in our commitment towards strengthening our homegrown startup ecosystem. We are happy to have received a large number of applications this year. It is truly inspiring to witness the grit and determination of founders who are working towards scaling innovative solutions that aim to shift paradigms and create real value,” remarked Chiratae Ventures founder and chairman Sudhir Sethi, while commenting on the announcement.

The five-week program is focused on key aspects in the growth of startups including market analysis, team building and culture, technology, product, market entry and expansion, and fundraising. The program also hosts tech experts and industry evangelists to create a high-level learning and knowledge-sharing experience for all participants. Through the program, the selected startups also gain access to both local and global markets via the company’s corporate collaboration partners.

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Find out more at entrepreneur.com.

The term Ayushman, with its roots in Sanskrit, is synonymous with longevity. Applied to various contexts, longevity is a state everyone aspires for – be it in personal life or in the context of an organisation. Businesses operate on a ‘going concern’ basis, a premise that presumes functioning of the business without the threat of closure or failure for the foreseeable future. Over the last few decades, the increasing advent of disruptive forces enabled by rapid innovation, fast-reducing barriers to entry across multiple industry verticals, rise of the digital economy, easier access to capital, free markets among others have resulted in numerous survival headaches for established companies. Early stage companies face even more trying circumstances, on a regular basis, to sustain and survive in brutal competitive environments.

Specifically, in the healthcare industry, tech-enabled businesses are redefining solutions to existing and new problems. The healthcare market in India is expected to grow to nearly US$300 billion by 2020. Specific impact of technology has been witnessed in medical record systems, telemedicine software, connected medical devices and digital therapeutics that enable patients manage chronic conditions at the comfort of their home. There has been a strong focus on Big Data & Analytics, Internet of Things (IoT) and AI in India. According to a NASSCOM report, 37 per cent Indian health-tech startups have built, or are building, IoT-enabled products and over 50 per cent have or are building AI-enabled products. Buoyed by this tremendous business opportunity in a market that is starting to take flight, the health-tech industry has become the cynosure of venture capital in India. With heightened investor interest and increasing transaction values in this decade, there is a strong confidence with the technologies, business models and the market opportunity. The public markets also echo this trend – with successful IPOs of Thyrocare, Narayana Hrudayalaya, Dr Lal PathLabs and Health Care Global (HCG).

Startups that lie between Pre-Series A and Series A rounds of funding often require tremendous knowledge and assistance in multiple areas, in addition to pure money. The founders may be brilliant and innovative; however, they may find themselves with limited experience in growing their business and achieving scale.

Startups will need to create processes that involve both people and business operations that can springboard their scaling efforts. Refining customer acquisition strategies, constantly enhancing engagement models, monitoring feedback and continuous improvement are crucial as startups begin to accelerate. Startups need to carefully assess the market and competition, articulate brand and positioning strategy, undertake changes in their product design and make it ready for scale, develop IP strategy, understanding unit economics, inculcate financial prudence and compliance among other essential aspects core to their business. Often getting access to market opportunities can appear daunting for early stage companies – and a savvy investor can make those connections with potential customers. Further, the startup leadership team can benefit with executive coaching from seasoned professionals who can lend advice on scaling up and sustaining larger organisations. Perfecting their investor pitches and developing readiness for future funding rounds is another key area where skills need to get developed or refined.

The guidance provided by state-of-the-art speed scaling ecosystems and corporate partners often is the difference between dazzling success and abject failure in the early stage ecosystem. Mentoring provides the right levers that, when utilised correctly, can guide people and processes in the direction of rapid growth. The right guidance can mean the difference between capturing market share with consummate ease versus eternal struggle to get POCs and to convert POCs to customers. It can mean the difference between a precise, data-driven pricing policy that perfectly captures customer segments versus leaving money on the table and/or ceding markets to competitors purely on price points.

Startups striving for longevity constantly need to fuel their innovation and growth story with smart capital – capital that catalyses growth both with true value addition. They need to prioritise on securing smart capital that will enable rapid growth through speed scaling. With a good strategy in place, these startups can utilise investments from such value-added investors to rapidly accelerate and become truly Ayushman.

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To find out more, visit expresshealthcare.in.

Amidst this global pandemic, the fundamental priority of individuals and societies should be to stay safe and healthy. Not only has this led to a spike in demand for cleaning products such as sanitisers and disinfectants, which protect against contracting COVID-19 from external sources, but also a rise in demand for immunity boosting supplements and medicine, which serve to strengthen the immune system from within. An industry that has benefitted from this surge in demand is that of alternative medicine, contributed particularly by the growth of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Ayurvedic Medicine. In this report, we seek to cast light on the trends in the alternative medicine industry, particularly focussing on TCM and Ayurvedic Medicine. We will examine alternative medicine companies making waves in these times, and explore what the future could possibly look like for this sector

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Find out more at yourstory.com.

Anthill Partner and Lumos Founding Member, Devang Mehta joins Latoken TV for a lively panel debate on HealthTech in Asia. Watch the archived version on Latoken’s website.

YourStory editor, Sindhu Kashyap, spoke at length to the Ayurythm founders and discussed their entrepreneurial journey, their inspiration for building an Ayurveda product, and more.

Read the entire piece on YourStory