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Nephrocare India, a Kolkata-based kidney care provider, has raised Rs 8.08 crore in a pre-initial public offering (IPO) round led by HDFC's Deepak Parekh. The company plans to use the funds to establish 300 comprehensive kidney care clinics across India over the next eight to ten years.
Marquee investors, including Deepak Parekh (former chairman of HDFC Limited), Bharat Shah (chairman, HDFC Securities), and Rajendra Agarwal (founder and managing director of Macleods Pharmaceuticals), among others, participated in the funding round.
The company aims to establish 300 Nephrocare centres across the country in the next eight to ten years, replicating the already demonstrated hub-and-spoke strategy. It expects to establish 22 high-end comprehensive kidney care facilities across the country by March 2026. Four centres will be opened by the end of the current financial year. The company is exploring various options for raising funds, including an IPO. The success of the pre-IPO round is a step forward towards this goal.
Founded in 2014, Nephrocare India operates three kidney care clinics in West Bengal and a flagship holistic healthcare facility in Salt Lake, Kolkata. Dr. Sengupta has a personal vision of positively impacting the lives of close to one million patients suffering from chronic kidney disease.
India contributes the highest number of renal failure patients in the world. An estimated one out of every eleven Indians is likely to be a victim of renal failure, the leading causes of which are said to be diabetes and hypertension. Often referred to as the 'Diabetes Capital of the World', India adds close to 250,000 new patients every year to the pool of people requiring dialysis support due to advanced kidney failure. There are around seventy million patients suffering from various chronic kidney diseases, but only about 12,881 haemodialysis centres are capable of performing dialysis across the country. There is a massive gap between the demand and supply of kidney care units in India.
