Cricketer Yuvraj Singh, who was instrumental in India’s 2011 World Cup win, is on an investment spree.
This week, his venture capital fund, YouWeCan Ventures, has acquired stake in two start-ups — Healthians.com and EduKart. These start-ups are focused on healthcare and education.
Healthians.com, an online healthcare marketplace, helps users discover affordable healthcare and provides transparency about price and quality.
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It aggregates diagnostic labs, crowd sourced sample collectors and nearby doctors.
The firm also makes medical records of patients available online.
“Having gone through life threatening medical condition, I’m extremely keen to promote preventive healthcare in India,” said Mr. Singh, who was diagnosed with a rare lung cancer but returned to international cricket in less than a year.
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“While most of us today have an online social profile or an online professional profile, there’s a large need to use technology to create and track individual health profile,” Mr. Singh added.
The company is targeting to form a network of over 1,000 Healthians’ branded labs in over 20 cities, including Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai.
It also plans to tie up with 2,000 pharmacy stores to enable them offer diagnostic tests along with medicine sales to their customers.
“For a healthcare brand, there can be no better partner than Yuvraj Singh,” said Deepak Sahni, Chief Executive of Healthians.
“We will do our best to achieve his dream of taking preventive healthcare to everyone across the entire country,” Deepak Sahni added.
Diagnostic market in India is a $5 billion (Rs.31,000 crore) industry, with over a million tests being conducted daily, according to research firm IBEF.
Healthians plans to profile over one million users and crowd source over 1,000 mobile health advisors. It also aims to conduct more than two lakh tests in next one year.
This week, Mr. Singh’s YouWeCan also invested $1 million (Rs.6.3 crore) in education marketplace EduKart, along with business conglomerate Holostik Group’s United Finsec and US-based seed fund 500 Start-ups.
Existing investors such as Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of mobile commerce platform Paytm, and Patni brothers - Amit and Arihant also participated in the round.