The LetsVenture platform helps early-stage founders connect with relevant investors. This is to make the process of fundraising efficient, transparent and controllable for the founder. We have always stood for early-stage startups as a segment – not particularly for a sector or vertical. This blog will take you through our Healthcare Council.
Our interactions with founders and micro-funds helped us realise that deep vertical focused communities were missing. When we say community, we mean ‘practitioners, customers, investors, founders and corporates in the same sector’. We refer to a community that goes beyond mentoring and engages actively to deliver real value to entrepreneurs. As a founder, I believe the commodity that we have to fiercely protect is time. Specifically, the time that is spent connecting with and learning from relevant stakeholders, and not wasted trying to find them. What we need to build is an expanded version of a Special Interest Group (SIG). This group will focus towards founders building businesses in specific sectors.
We decided to pilot this with the Healthcare sector as it is an emerging trend on the platform. 400+ healthcare startups have registered on the platform in last 12 months. And, healthcare has emerged as an area of interest for both VCs and angels. We are fortunate to get support and acceptance from the best stakeholders in the space. Raghavendra Prasad, who had earlier founded Qikwell (which got acquired by Practo in 2016) and Paddy Padmanabhan, founder of Damo Consulting (a US-based healthcare growth advisory firm) have joined as advisors to the Council. We have also onboard Cygnus Hospitals as our first Ecosystem Partner. We aim to add many more stakeholders by this quarter.
“Technology is going to be a major enabler in bringing workflow efficiency in healthcare processes. We see significant value in staying abreast with the latest technology innovations being driven by healthcare entrepreneurs and are glad to partner with LetsVenture for the same.”
Dr. Shuchin, founder of Cygnus Hospitals
The Council aims to make 15-20 investments in the next year, focusing on healthcare startups at the seed and pre-series A stage. In the specific cases of strong IP-driven concepts, we are also open to come in at the pre-seed stage and provide patient capital to the founders. The underlying idea is to help founders navigate through the complexities of the healthcare ecosystem.
We think of our sector-focused councils as a coming together of Capital, Community, and Customer. With the great response that we are seeing for the Healthcare Council, we plan to launch similar structures for 3 more sectors next quarter.
We are also conducting our first offline round table meetup on the National Health Stack at LetsIgnite, our flagship event, on June 15th in Bangalore. For details check - LetsIgnite 2019.
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