Hyderabad: What does it take to start a business? If you say money, you are wrong. All that is required is an idea and a steelly will to implement it. There are many examples which validate this theory. One of such examples is the success story of eKincare founder Kiran Kalakuntla.
eKincare is founded to help people in digitising their health records and also to alert them about future health risks by analysing the data. “I got this idea after I felt there is a need for NRIs, who are working abroad, to monitor the health of their families in India. Typically, parents stay back in India and there is no way their children in the US can understand the health reports as most of them are techies,” said Kiran explaining the idea behind his company, which now caters to anyone and everyone and not just parents of NRIs.
Immediately Kiran took the plunge by quitting his cushy six-digit paying job at AT&T in the United States and headed back to India to pursue his dream project in September 2014.
“I invested Rs 10 lakh to start the company. And the funds were never a problem. Even before the product was launched, we got $600,000 seed funding from Bitkemy ventures, Adroi-tent and other HNIs,” he explained.
The core of eKincare is a smartphone app, which allows users to take photos of doctor’s prescriptions and diagnostic reports, which will automatically get uploaded to the database. The backend team at eKincare would digitise the content from these photos. This data will be used by an algorithm to analyse and predict future health risks.
So what is the revenue model? “It is absolutely free. We already have 2.5 lakh users. Our revenue comes from our tie-ups diagnostic centres and our institutional tie-ups. But you should not think that eKincare will earn at the expense of our user. In fact, we will get diagnostic centres offer discounted rates to us. We have alrea-dy tied up with around 1,800 diagnostic centres across India,” he said.
Apart from this, Kiran claims the company will get revenue from insurance companies which use its predict analytical software to access future risks of their policyholders.
Speaking about the challenges, he said cleaning up diagnostic reports in India has been a daunting task. “We lack health standard codes like those in the US. In India, each diagnostic centre may have a slightly different benchmark and this would make digitising and predictive analysis most difficult. However, we have harmonised these benchmarks and use the disease data collected from the US after suitably adjusting for Indians.”
While in many cases entrepreneurs are discouraged by their families, Kiran was lucky to get a great supporter in his wife Mansa, who quit her job in the US to move back to India, and his joint family, which helped him to stay focused on his company.
