Country for PR: United Kingdom
Contributor: PR Newswire Europe
Tuesday, April 23 2019 - 17:58
AsiaNet
Health-tech AI Startup mfine Raises $17.2 Million in Series B; Set to Create India's Largest Virtual Healthcare Delivery Network
BANGALORE, India and TOKYO, April 23, 2019 /PRNewswire-AsiaNet/ --

    - Investors: SBI Investment, SBI Ven Capital Pte. Ltd., Japan; BEENEXT, 
Singapore, Stellaris Venture Partners and Prime Venture Partners

    - Plans afoot to onboard over 2500 doctors from 250 hospitals and reach 
150,000 consultations per month in the next one year

    mfine [https://www.mfine.co ], a health-tech AI startup from India, has 
raised $17.2 million in Series B funding. The investment was led by SBI 
Investment [https://www.sbigroup.co.jp/english/company/group/sbinvestment.html 
], a Japan-based venture capital firm and a subsidiary of the SBI Group. 
Singapore-based SBI Ven Capital [https://www.sbivencapital.com.sg ] which is 
SBI Group's Southeast-Asian investment arm and tech-focused global venture 
capital firm BEENEXT [https://www.beenext.com ] also participated in the round 
alongside existing investors, Stellaris Venture Partners 
[http://www.stellarisvp.com ] and Prime Venture Partners [http://primevp.in ].

    Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/875679/mfine_Logo.jpg

    Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/875675/mfine_founders.jpg 

    Over 100,000 customers have consulted on mfine in the last 15 months and 
customer base is growing 30% month over month. More than 500 MD/MS doctors, 
including some of India's top doctors from over 100 reputed hospitals practice 
across 20 specialties on mfine. Collectively, they have been able to expand 
their reach beyond the physical boundaries of the cities and have served over 
800 towns in India. On mfine, not only are users consulting for acute illnesses 
like viral infections but also for chronic diseases such as diabetes and 
arthritis. Patients are also consulting for super specialties such as 
cardiology, oncology, orthopedics and fertility.

    mfine follows a unique model of partnering with leading and trusted 
hospitals instead of aggregating individual doctors on its platform. Hospital 
partnerships enable mfine to make high quality care of trusted doctors 
available on a digital channel. For the hospitals, mfine is their new center on 
the cloud bringing in more patients and offering premium services, long-term 
care programs, super specialties without any upfront investments. Specialist 
Doctors from these hospitals are assisted by mfine's AI system, improving their 
efficiency & effectiveness dramatically. mfine's care team of more than 60 
in-house doctors are working alongside the AI system offering best possible 
diagnosis and care. The AI engine has the ability to diagnose and triage over 
1200 common diseases, read hundreds of health parameters in the diagnostic 
reports thus saving significant time for the doctors.

    mfine's success and uptake can be attributed to the dire need of a service 
which enables quick and easy access to medical services in a country which has 
a dismal doctor to patient ratio, predominantly out-of-pocket health spending 
and inaccessibility of quality care. India has one doctor for every 1700 
people, and if one considers only specialists, this stands at one doctor for 
every 5000 people. There are 1000 primary healthcare cases & about 100 
secondary healthcare cases reported in a hospital everyday and this number is 
rising along with the rise of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). On the other 
hand, more than 350 million smartphone users and rapidly falling bandwidth 
prices are redefining the way essential services like healthcare are being 
delivered in India. Increased internet penetration, rise in digital payments 
and big-ticket government initiatives like Ayushman Bharat is bringing in 
venture capital investment in home-grown health-tech startups. Investments in 
Indian health-tech companies reached an all time high of  $571 million in 2018*.

    mfine aims to be one of the largest virtual hospitals in the world with 
services across primary care, secondary care and chronic care management. In 
the next 12 months, it will bring together India's top 250 hospitals, from 10 
cities with more than 2500 doctors onto its virtual hospital platform. The 
company will be tripling its investments in AI, mobile engineering and hardware 
integration.

    With this fresh funding, mfine plans to solidify its leadership position in 
delivering an AI-driven, on-demand healthcare service across India. mfine will 
use the funds to expand its hospital network across the country, build its AI 
technology and expand the recently launched additional services which include 
delivering medicines, conducting preventive health screenings and diagnostic 
tests.

    mfine was founded in February 2017 by Ashutosh Lawania 
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/lawania ] (Myntra co-founder) and Prasad Kompalli 
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/prasadkompalli ], a former business head at 
Myntra. The founders were later joined by Ajit Narayanan 
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajitnarayanan ], ex-Myntra CTO, Arjun Choudhary 
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunchoudhary ], ex-Myntra head of growth 
marketing. Including the current funding round, the startup has raised over $24 
million and has 200 employees in Bengaluru & Hyderabad.

    The mfine app is currently available in English on Google Playstore and 
Appstore:
http://bit.ly/mfine-care

    Supporting Quotes

    Tomoyuki Nii, Executive Officer of SBI Investment
mfine's AI healthcare delivery platform has the potential to bring in huge 
transformation in the Indian healthcare system where quality doctors are far 
and few and access to quality is limited. With an on-demand model and 
state-of-the-art AI and mobile tech, mfine stood out for us with great 
potential to deliver large scale impact in healthcare delivery in India.

    Teru Sato, Founder & Managing Partner, BEENEXT
mfine's product and user experience stood out for us. The application of AI to 
help deliver large-scale impact in delivering healthcare is game changing. 
mfine has a very strong team with the founders having deep technical knowledge 
and with the right vision and business model for building a large impactful 
business in India's healthcare sector. We will continue to support companies 
like mfine in India.

    Prasad Kompalli, CEO & cofounder, mfine
We believe that India will leapfrog the methods of healthcare delivery that 
were adopted in the developed nations, and mobile will be at the centre of this 
disruption. The current funding is an endorsement to mfine's unique model of 
working with reputed & accredited hospitals and using technology to make 
quality healthcare accessible to millions of people. The consumer traction 
proves that our model works and with this investment we want to scale the 
service across the country. We are delighted to have SBI and BEENEXT on board 
as they share our vision of providing quality healthcare on-demand using AI and 
mobile tech. We see in them long term partners, in building one of the largest 
healthcare platforms in the world.

    About mfine

    mfine is an AI-driven, on-demand healthcare service that provides its users 
access to virtual consultations and connected care programmes from the 
country's top hospitals. The app-based mhealth platform partners with leading 
and trusted hospitals instead of aggregating individual doctors. mfine users 
can consult doctors from their preferred hospitals via chat or video to get 
prescriptions and/or routine care. mfine was launched in December 2017 by 
Ashutosh Lawania [https://www.linkedin.com/in/lawania ] and Prasad Kompalli 
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/prasadkompalli ] who were later joined by Ajit 
Narayanan [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajitnarayanan ] and Arjun Choudhary 
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunchoudhary ]. For more details, please visit: 
https://www.mfine.co

    *according to Traxcn data

    Source: mfine

Translations

Japanese