Angels eye health care pie via online ventures

At a time when large private equity funds are making heavy investments in the Indian health care sector, angel investors are testing the waters in online health care ventures.

The past few months have seen a series of angel and venture capital investments take place in online booking platforms for doctors' appointments as well as diagnostic services.

The latest deal involves diagnostics tests booking platform MyLabYogi raising angel funding from Hyderabad Angels and Lead Angels. The start-up was founded in 2012 by Aneesh Khanna, who had previously worked at Apollo Hospitals Group and Metropolis Healthcare. Mylabyogi.com allows users to book a laboratory test online and schedule a home visit for blood collection. Its clients in Mumbai include Holy Family Hospital, Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital, Prince Aly Khan Hospital and Dr Jariwala Laboratory.

Online doctor appointment platforms such as Lybrate, HelpingDoc.com, doctree, DoctorC have also attracted a significant chunk of angel funding in the recent past.

Sandeep Singhal, co-founder of Nexus Venture Partners, said: "Major trends which drive the investments in online healthcare firms are the overall growth in healthcare expenditure in a growing macroeconomic environment, increased insurance coverage and wider availability of healthcare facilities."

Two days ago, Hyderabad-based Simplify Wellness Inc, which operates under the brand of DoctorC, an online platform that enables consumers to compare prices and quality across diagnostic centres and book appointments, secured Rs 2.5-crore from Leviathan Investments and Splice Advisors.

Last month, India and US-based Lybrate Inc., which runs Lybrate.com, an online platform for patients to book appointments with doctors, raised $1.23 million in funding from Nexus Venture Partners. Founded in 2013 by Saurabh Arora, Lybrate is an online and mobile-based platform, which connects patients with doctors. Lybrate's service is currently available in 20 cities, including Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi and Hyderabad.

"There is a trend towards increased consumer awareness towards healthcare and a desire to have more control over their use of services. Also, increased use of smartphones to access convenience services such as e-commerce, bookings and information retrieval, helps the sector to grow," Singhal added.

In August, Delhi-based HelpingDoc.com raised $1.5 million from Senior Marketing System, a Malaysia-based provider of health-related information services. Bangalore-based Doctree Health Infoservices, which provides web-based services to patients looking for treatments and price quotes from various doctors and hospitals, raised funding from S4 Holdings in February 2014.

Last year, Rajan Anandan, MD of Google India, with a few others made an angel investment in health care services company Docsuggest, which aggregates information on doctors and hospitals such as the doctors' degree, experience, expertise, fees, and insurance options.

Angel investor Rehan Yar Khan said: "The health care space is large and fragmented, where people currently use word-of-mouth to locate doctors, labs, etc. There may be a very good speciality doctor or a general practitioner in your neighbourhood of whom you may not be aware of. This is akin to finding information before the Just Dial era or booking movie tickets before BookMyShow was launched."