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Ankush Sharma
Business Consultant ...ย โขย 5m
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 Indiaโs 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 didnโt 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 canโt 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 donโt work. Online-only healthcare plays well in investor decks, but in the Indian market, users donโt pay enough to sustain it. Digital might drive leads, but it doesnโt drive revenue. The ARPU (average revenue per user) is too low to cover operational costs. The economics break fast. 3. Offline infrastructure isnโt 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 1โ2 years just to break even. If you canโt 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, thatโs not just a bad bet โ itโs business suicide.
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