Orios Venture Partners, a Rs 300-crore fund launched by serial entrepreneur Rehan Yar Khan in August 2014, has made its first investment in Ziffi.com, a Mumbai-based company that enables online booking systems for beauty salons, doctors and health tests.
Through this investment, Orios Venture Partners has picked up an undisclosed minority stake in the company and also appointed a member on its board.
Ziffi.com offers doctor and health test bookings in Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Bangalore, and salon bookings only in Mumbai. It covers over 1,000 salons, 15,000 doctors and 5,000 diagnostic centers, and has till date booked over 250,000 appointments. It has a team of 40 employees across the four cities where it operates.
"Internet is the new industrial revolution, and so everything is moving to the internet. If you had to earlier make bookings, you had to make calls, but now it is so much easier," said khan, who has in his personal capacity earlier invested in several startups, including Druva, Olacabs, Reach Accountant and Sapience.
"I think there are a lot of vertical players in these segment who are doing one of these verticals like doctor appointments, etc. What I like about Ziffi's approach is that if I am going to keep one app on my phone, it should cover all the verticals, or else I would end up having lots of apps on my phone," Khan said.
Ziffi.com was founded in 2010 by four alumni of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay and IIT Kharagpur--Shantanu Jha, Keerthi Kiran Chennupati, Anshuman Pandey and Pushkar Soni. The company has earlier received angel funding from prominent investors like Vishal Gondal, Sanjay Parthasarathy, Taher Khorakiwala, and Ranjan Anandan.
The company was formerly known as Docsuggest.com, which was later changed with an aim to widen focus on enabling bookings across health and wellness spectrum.
Ziffi.com is also in the process of launching a mobile application that will enable users to make bookings for haircuts, beauty treatments, heath checkups and doctors.
The company will utilise these funds to expand its network, strengthen technology interface and design, and invest in marketing and brand building.
According to a study conducted by Orios Venture Partners, Khan said, currently around three million people transact online in India, which is growing rapidly and is likely to touch 120 million by 2020.
Additionally, Khan said, his newly set up fund is aggressively looking at making more investments. "Now that we have launched the fund we hope to be quite active. We are constantly looking at good opportunities. You will hear more from us soon. Our fund investors have asked us to become very active, and this is a very opportune time to do that," Khan said.
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