StartHealth - the new technology driven healthcare program is being launched by a team including Manipal Hospitals and Narayana Health and is supported by investor Unitus Seed Fund, PATH, an international non-profit organisation, and one of the world’s premier bio-pharmaceutical company, Pfizer. The team has got together with an investor to offer up to Rs 10 crore in awards and funding to early-stage start-ups that seek to boost access to reasonable technology-driven healthcare products and amenities for low-income grade mass in the country.
Unitus Seed Fund have been in talks with several early staged healthcare start-ups for some time now and StartHealth is now being considered to be the stepping stone required to develop these start-ups by investing in their early stages and helping them to come up with terms of a massive supply-demand gap in healthcare sector in India. The major problem Unitus will emphasise to solve using technology will be to enhance the accessibility and affordability of the healthcare products in India as the demand is enormous.
Interested health care startups in India can Apply here for StartHealth program and may even get funded.
This coming year, five start-ups are expected to get selected for Rs 50 lakhs of non-dilutive capital to fund immediate pre-seed business growth and hands-on support from PATH, Manipal Hospitals and Narayana Health's staff. They will also get access to expert networks of Pfizer and Unitus in India and globally and facilities of Manipal Hospitals and Narayana Health for pilots and market testing.
Providing appropriate platform to healthcare technology entrepreneurs for evaluating the prototype situations with proper and expert clinical solutions is one of the major solutions that this initiative will try to come up with in near future.
Areas of interest for healthcare innovation for StartHealth partners are low-cost diagnostic and monitoring devices connecting doctors and patients, healthcare cloud IT solutions and innovations for use in labs or clinical settings to improve the quality of care at lower levels of healthcare system, such as primary care clinics.
Unitus Seed Fund, along with its investing partners, will also provide capital of Rs 1 crore to help the start-ups for growing their business and raising more capital.
Dipika Matthias, Director of PATH's Global Health Innovation Hub initiative said "Through our partnership with Unitus, we can improve the efficiency of identifying and pursuing due diligence on such groups, as well as the effectiveness of helping them to develop and scale their businesses."
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