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Ankush Sharma

Business Consultant ...ย โ€ขย 1d

A once-promising Indian health-tech startup backed by marquee investors has shut down โ€” and the story behind it offers sobering lessons for founders and investors eyeing Indiaโ€™s healthcare market. Back in 2020, an investor placed capital into Onco, a health-tech platform that aimed to aggregate cancer hospitals across India. The concept was bold: patients could browse hospitals and treatment options online, consult with doctors virtually, and choose where to get treated โ€” all through a single app or website. With over $7 million in funding from firms like Accel and Chiratae, and a strong digital brand drawing 25,000+ monthly visitors and 1,000+ organic cancer patient leads, Onco seemed poised for scale. But things didnโ€™t pan out. According to the investor, the bet was that hospitals would see value in aligning with a brand that could drive digital patient acquisition at scale. That assumption proved costly. Here are three hard-earned lessons from the fallout: 1. Aggregating hospitals in India is a power imbalance you canโ€™t win. Hospitals hold all the cards. They delay payments, sidestep agreements, and extract every possible margin. If you're building a business that relies on their cooperation, you're effectively at their mercy โ€” with zero pricing power and ballooning compliance costs. 2. Digital-first sounds sexy โ€” but the numbers donโ€™t work. Online-only healthcare plays well in investor decks, but in the Indian market, users donโ€™t pay enough to sustain it. Digital might drive leads, but it doesnโ€™t drive revenue. The ARPU (average revenue per user) is too low to cover operational costs. The economics break fast. 3. Offline infrastructure isnโ€™t optional โ€” and it burns cash. Indian patients still prefer walking into a physical center and speaking to a doctor face-to-face. That means building brick-and-mortar presence, which is brutally capital-intensive. Each center takes 1โ€“2 years just to break even. If you canโ€™t bankroll that kind of expansion, you stall. The takeaway? If you're building an aggregator-only business in Indian healthcare โ€” stop and reassess. Without control over margins, infrastructure, or patient trust, you're just a middleman with no leverage and no way to win. In markets like this, thatโ€™s not just a bad bet โ€” itโ€™s business suicide.

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