Telehealth startup Lybrate, founded by Facebook and Snapdeal professionals, has raised $10.2 million in a Series A round to add up to 200 staff and introduce a video component to its symptom query service.
It’s backed by three investors, including Tiger Global Management, Nexus Venture Partners and Tata Group Chairman Emeritus Ratan Tata. Lybrate CEO Saurabh Arora identified the investors and confirmed the fundraise amount in emailed responses to questions.
The company, which claims to be the number one medical app in India, sees a way to use its technology to help address the overwhelmed health system in India, which currently has one doctor for every 1,700 people.
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Nexus had previously provided $1.2 million in seed funding last year.
Lybrate provides a mobile and web-based app for users to send questions about their symptoms to some of the 80,000 doctors on its platform, including specialists. It also has a section “health feed” to give users health tips on areas such as healthy eating, smoking cessation, exercise and weight management. It lets users store their medical records, too.
A former data scientist at Facebook, Arora said Lybrate will use the funding to scale its technology and operations. It will grow from its current level of 50 employees to 200 in the next 12 months. “We will soon be launching the video feature for private conversations, along with real-time voice conversations that will further ease … the way communications between users and doctors are taking place,” Arora said. “We constantly look to innovate our product technologically and introduce features that could make the communication far more seamless and smooth.”
The majority of Lybrate’s users, 60 percent, are based in cities, but it’s interested in expanding beyond those areas in the future.
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Lybrate sees itself as the largest telemedicine business in India, but Arora noted that this area of digital health is in the early stages in India and it is very unorganized at the moment.
There are many players in the digital health segment. Among them are Karma Healthcare, MediAngels — which focuses on second opinions, as well as broader digital health companies like Praxify, and personal health record provider AllizHealth.
“The opportunities are also immense,” Arora said. “We are working to solve the fundamental issue that has been staring in the face of Indian healthcare delivery: the inaccessibility of healthcare experts. Lybrate is bridging the gap between patients and doctors by providing them a platform to communicate with each other from anywhere, anytime.”
