Practo acquires Fitho, to focus on preventive healthcare
After raising $30 million funding from Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners in Feb 2015, Asia’s largest doctor search engine Practo today announced acquisition of digital fitness solution Fitho Wellness. The size and structure of the deal was not disclosed, but Shashank ND, Co-founder and CEO of Practo mentioned that the deal is a combination of cash and equity.
The acquisition aims at helping Practo expand its offerings and move into the preventive healthcare space. This is also in alignment with Practo’s vision to be the single health app for consumers, reaching 50M consumers.
Founded in 2011, FitHo is one of the early players in preventive healthcare segment from India. It helps people manage weight & lifestyle diseases by building intelligent technology based products that can provide personalized advice to millions of consumers through the website and Android mobile app. It focuses on helping consumers improve their nutrition and physical activity. The company claims to have over 65,000 users on their platform.
It all started in the late part of last year when Shashank was evaluating technology startups in preventive healthcare space and zeroed down to Fitho. After a couple of meetings, both the co-founders decided to go ahead with the deal.
What happens to Fitho post acquisition?
Fitho has been bootstrapping themselves and is a profitable company with over 6% of their customers paying Rs 900-1000 on an average, per month. Post acquisition, the founders of Fitho, Dhruv Gupta and Prachi Gupta (co-founders) will join Practo. Dhruv will be the Product Head for Preventive Healthcare and Prachi will join as the GM - Operations, New Segments. Practo also acquires the proprietary algorithm and recommendation engine of Fitho.
FitHo’s current offering will phase out over the next 6 months and Practo will launch a completely new preventive product that will leverage some of the technology from FitHo. Team Fitho will completely shift to Bangalore (from Delhi) in a month. Dhruv says,
Together we will be able to offer consumers interesting and unique solutions that are more comprehensive than either of us had before. We also find a great cultural fit with Practo where the discussions have been very collaborative about building great products and businesses together.
More acquisitions on cards for Practo
Shashank says,
“This is the first of several acquisitions we are exploring. It is the next step in our mission to make a single health app which offers consumers a more comprehensive solution ranging from preventive to curative healthcare.”
Apart from acquisitions, Practo is looking at other strategies as well. In alignment with the Digital India campaign by PMO India, Practo aims to get more doctors, hospitals and pharmacies online and on mobile. But Shashank emphasized that their focus is going to be on health records and subscription segment and they are not looking at fulfilment (delivery) part at all. They are looking to acquire companies in Middle-East Africa and Latin America as well.
Take a tour of the Practo workplace
Practo’s monetisation
Practo earns revenues via following two products:
- Practo Ray – SaaS based practice management solution of choice for thousands of doctors managing millions of appointments and digital healthcare records every year.
- Marketplace
The company's international revenues are growing and because of its reach, a lot of other companies are showing interest to partner at the moment. This could soon become another revenue stream for the company.
Practo’s present and future
With presence in 37 cities, Practo is a 1000 member team currently and claims to be no.1 app in India, Singapore and Philippines in healthcare segment. The company is targeting to grow aggressively in tier-2 cities in India along with Middle-East Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe. Shashank says,
Language has not been an issue in adoption till now but going ahead in markets like Portugal or Indonesia will require vernacular versions rolling out for our app.
There are some interesting announcements expected from the company in near future and even a payment gateway is in the works. Watch out this space for more updates on Practo.
