Medwell Ventures plans to expand; invest $50 million in five years

Armed with fresh funding, Medwell Ventures, the company that operates Nightingales specialty home healthcare services, plans to expand into other cities in the South and West of India and invest $50 million by 2020.

Fidelity Growth Partners India, along with Fidelity Biosciences, has invested $10 million in funding to expand operations in Hyderabad and Mumbai, apart from Bangalore.

It provides doctors, nurses, physiotherapists and trained paramedics to treat dementia, stroke management, amongst other chronic diseases.

This investment will be used in expanding into 5 cities by 2018 and Nightingales will invest $50 million in the next five years, said Vishal Bali, Chairman and co founder of Nightingales.

He added that the company will raise additional funding depending on the way it grows its business.

Further, Fidelity has also picked up a minority stake in the company with this investment, company officials said but did not quantify the stake details. The demand for home healthcare services is on the rise as patients prefer to get treated for chronic diseases as they find it increasingly difficult to travel and bear expensive treatment. As a result, entities like Nightingales and Portea are starting to provide healthcare services which can be bought on a subscription basis. For example, a fortnightly Blood Pressure (BP) and sugar test is charged Rs. 1,000 a month. Nightingales has around 300 treatment providers on their rolls, which is expected to grow by 150 per cent in the next two years, said Lalit Pai, CEO of Nightingales.

Training of staff

This investment in trained personnel is gaining importance as the company is facing issues with respect to its quality of services, which comes with a premium, say industry watchers.

According to an elderly couple who subscribed to services for BP monitoring and sugar levels, the personnel who provided their services did not give any feedback. Since founded in 2014, company officials say that Nightingales has around 8,000 patients. Business Line