New Delhi, June 25 -- Digital-health platform Ekincare, backed by HealthQuad, Sabre Partners and others, is strategising for its next phase of growth, which will include acquisitions and overseas expansion, a top official told VCCircle.

The Mumbai-headquartered company, operated by Aayuv Technologies Pvt Ltd, is also aiming to breakeven this fiscal, said Kiran Kalakuntla, co-founder and CEO of Ekincare.

Towards these the goals, the company may look to raise funds, added Kalakuntla without sharing further details.

On acquisitions, he said, "We are looking at adjacencies, whether it is for claims adjudication business or the embedded vertical, we are definitely in discussions with several assets at this point."

The claims adjudication business offers a SaaS platform that automates the review and assessment of health claims for healthtech and insuretech companies, and the embedded vertical offers healthcare infra including a network of doctors and diagnostics and the tools to integrate this infrastructure.

Background

Founded in 2015 by Kalakuntla, Srikanth Samudrala, and Noel Coutinho, Ekincare uses artificial intelligence, data analytics and telemedicine to offer personalised and accessible preventive healthcare.

The company originally set out to build a personal health assistant for people wanted to monitor the health of their parents who were living independently in India. However, Kalakuntla said, they found healthcare data in India to be fragmented; hence, the company started as a health record company in 2013.

"We pivoted to solve for data first," he said, adding that they now have a patent on extracting, cleaning, structuring and standardising medical records that help to building personalised models.

In 2017, Ekincare found the "product-market fit" when a company with 9,000 employees reached out to understand organisation-wide workforce health trends. After they presented their report, Ekincare signed a three-year contract with the corporate. Gradually, it grew its clientele and companies asked Ekincare to consolidate other benefits such as mental wellness, teleconsultation, dental and vision. With this service, client companies could directly pay for their employees' OPD health consultations through Ekincare's platform that would handle everything from doctor appointments to bill payments.

To date, Ekincare has partnered with over 1,200 enterprises, including Accenture, Capgemini, KPMG, BlackRock and Bristol Myers, and built a network of more than 40,000 healthcare providers across India.

In 2022, the company secured $15 million (Rs 114 crore at the time) as part of its Series B funding led by HealthQuad and Sabre Partners, with participation from existing investors Eight Roads Ventures, Ventureast, Siana Capital and Endiya Partners. Prior to this funding, Ekincare raised $3.6 million in a Series A funding round led by an undisclosed new investor in 2019.

Three verticals

The company now operates in three lines of business: corporate business, claims adjudication, and embedded or API business.

The corporate business, which Kalakuntla described as a "cash cow," is Ekincare's largest revenue segment, offering primary and preventative care benefits to corporate employees. In the second business line, the company offers a software-as-a-service (SaaS) to reduce claims adjudication time from 32 hours to less than 2 minutes using AI. The third line, the embedded business, offers software tools for health-tech companies to integrate Ekincare's outpatient department (OPD) solutions and provide services.

Kalakuntla said Ekincare's corporate business is growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 50-55% and that the claims adjudication business, set up two years ago, will also grow beyond India.

Its embedded business is in a growth-stage, expanding at a 150% CAGR over the last three years. Kalakuntla said Ekincare will scale this vertical in India first before expanding globally.

Financials

The company's operating margins have improved over the last 4-5 years from -122% to -10%, said Kalakuntla. The company expects to break even this year because of capital efficiency. Seventy percent of their expenses are people, he said.

As per VCCEdge, the company's standalone revenue rose almost 75% to Rs 91.5 crore, with an EBITDA loss of roughly Rs 19 crore in FY25. Kalakuntla said the company's revenue exceeded Rs 100 crore in FY26, without providing the exact figure. He expects Ekincare to grow by "another" 50% in FY27.

Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from VC Circle.