Healthcare startup Pristyn Care raises $96 million, joins Unicorn club

Pristyn Care – a health-tech startup specialising in secondary-care surgeries, said on Wednesday that it has raised $ 96 Million in Series E round. With this funding, the valuation of Pristyn Care has more than doubled in the last seven months and is now at $ 1.4 billion, making it the latest digital health startup to become a unicorn. It is the 42nd such startup which became a unicorn in 2021.

This latest round of funding was led by marquee investors such as Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, Winter Capital, Epiq Capital, Hummingbird Ventures and Trifecta Capital. Angel investors in this round include Kunal Shah (founder and CEO, CRED), Deepinder Goyal (co-founder and CEO, Zomato), Abhiraj Singh Bhal (co-founder & CEO, Urban Company) and Varun Alagh (co-founder & CEO, Mamaearth).

Pristyn Care will utilise this new investment to enhance its offerings by adopting the latest surgical technologies. It would expand into new disease categories, strengthening and modernizing partner-hospital infrastructure, training its surgeons and further developing its product and technology.

By March 2022, the company plans to increase its geographical footprint by expanding to over 50 cities and towns and 1000 surgical centres. Pristyn Care also intends to double its team size. With technology as the backbone of its operations, the company will hire highly qualified engineers, who will form a quarter of its new workforce.

“With our expansion plans firmly in place and on track, we will accomplish our ambition of reaching 1000 surgical centres and 5 million patient interactions by March 2022,” said Pristyn Care co-founder Harsimarbir (Harsh) Singh. “We will continue to invest in newer, world-class surgical technology to ensure faster patient recovery, shorter hospital stay and the smoothest surgery experience possible for patients and their families.”

In April this year, Pristyn Care, has got $53 million in a funding round led by US investment fund Tiger Global Management. The firm had said the deal had raised the company’s valuation rose to more than $550 million, up from $250 million six months ago.

Singh, said the firm has built a rock-solid technology backbone that strengthens its patient-first initiatives - such as end-to-end support services during the entire process of surgery, billing transparency and at-home insurance claim processing - and ensure that patients are treated in the most comfortable manner.

“We will invest in newer surgical technologies to provide world-class treatment and experience to our surgery patients,” said Dr Vaibhav Kapoor, Co-founder, Pristyn Care. “We plan to expand our surgical offerings in more cities and towns as well as international patients seeking treatment in India.”

The firm said its  400 doctors come with a wealth of experience of having operated on the most complex cases. “Right from metros to smaller towns we are committed to hiring only the best doctors at Pristyn Care,” said Kapoor.

Pristyn Care has scaled 5X since January 2021and expects to be profitable in the next 12-18 months. At present, it operates via over 150 clinics and 700 partner hospitals with a panel of experienced doctors who work exclusively for the company. Its network currently spans seven metro cities – Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kolkata-and 33 tier 2 and 3 cities.

Dr Garima Sawhney, co-founder, Pristyn Care said a fairly large number of patients from small towns have to travel, sometimes hundreds of kilometres, to seek quality surgical care in nearby metro cities. “We aim to bridge this accessibility gap in the surgery space and take superior quality surgeries to patients in Tier 2 & 3 cities of the nation,” said Sawhney. “Functioning on a scalable asset-light ecosystem, we’re able to offer high-end surgery solutions close to patients’ residences, thereby helping them with care that is truly closer to home.”