This Hyderabad-based Start-up is Helping Corporates Improve the Health of their EmployeesHealthtech firm ekincare provides an integrated platform wherein healthcare consultancies and checkups are available in a corporate setting

Hyderabad-based healthtech start-up ekincare raised $3.6 million in Series A round of funding from a clutch of existing investors including Venture East, Eight Roads and Touchstone Equities. Total funding raised by the company till now is $5.6 million. The funds will be used to strengthen ekincare's technology platform, business development, marketing and expand its portfolio of offerings in the corporate health benefits market.

Ekincare is a corporate health benefit company which provides services such as health check-up, nutritional consultancy, everything combined on a single platform in a B2B setting. It was founded in 2014 by Kiran Kalakuntla and Srikanth Samudrala.

Co-founders of ekincare- Kiran Kalakuntla and Srikanth Samudrala

Focusing on Employee Healthcare

Employees of a company can benefit from the services provided by the platform in several ways.

"Everytime a transaction is done on the platform, it generates data. We standardize the data, go through the analytics offered and provide the HR where they can actually understand what the risk factors in an entire employee base are," co-founder Kiran Kalakuntla toldEntrepreneur India. He cited an example as well, "For example X percentage of male employees in Mumbai's supply chain department have a propensity of hypertension."

Explaining how ekincare comes in, he said, "Rather than paying money to do hypertension programme for the entire organization, they can target a specific segment within their employees and actually track the health outcomes of that as well." He also added that similar data can be used by insurance companies as well to do better technical analysis and underwriting so that the premium rates goes down, thus optimizing healthcare rates.

Getting Investors on Board

At a time, when investors are fearful of investing in healthtech start-ups, how did ekincare manage to convince them?

He says that one of the reasons why investors decided to invest in the start-up is because it is "integrated". From additional consulting to accessing family history of previous data, everything is easily accessible.

"Being an integrated platform, we are able to use data that is generated to personalize the experience for the end user and the company, and it is something we excel at and which has also helped us bag funding from investors."

At the moment, ekincare has 6,000 diagnostic centres as partners across the country. What the start-up aims to achieve is simple. "Educate the Indian HR audience about preventive healthcare in the corporate setting," he said.