Qube Health raises Rs 25 cr in pre-series-A round at Rs 200 cr valuation

Healthcare payments startup Qube Health has raised Rs 25 crore in a pre-series-A round from its existing investors Inflection Point Ventures and Green Ivy Ventures, and a few family office investors, at a valuation of Rs 200 crore.

Qube offers a payment system and healthcare credit line to employees of corporates that sign up. Its offer comes as a complement to the group health insurance policy provided by employers and also helps a person from out-of-pocket medical bills or those not fully covered by the health coverage, to paying non-cashless bill payments.

Its customers can borrow and pay from a pre-assigned credit limit within one year with no interest or fees. While the credit line is free for employees, it charges a subscription fee from employers on behalf of the employee.

The AI-driven healthtech platform has already aggregated over 11,000 hospitals and clinics, and partners with insuretechs, insurance companies, insurance brokers, e-pharmacy chains and others within the ecosystem.

Though a statement from the city-based startup -- cofounded by Chris George and Gagan Kapur in late 2019 -- did not quantify the investment and equity dilution, a source in the know of the Rs 25 crore top-up deal told PTI on Monday that through this transaction the founders have diluted 10 per cent of their holding, valuing it at Rs 200 crore. Promoters still hold 90 per cent of the firm.

Its chief executive Chris George said this funding round adds to their pre-series-A corpus and gives them a runway of up to two years while setting us up for our upcoming series-A.

With medical inflation doubling in the last five years, insurance is turning out to be inadequate and reports say Indians are paying over USD 55 billion every year on healthcare expenses from their pockets.

George said since its founding, it has activated Rs 1,000 crore of medical credit to over 2 lakh employees of 270 corporates and plans to ramp this up in the next three years to Rs 3,000 crore.

The firm raised its first external funding in April 2021 from Inflection Point Ventures, Mohit Burman of the Dabur Group, Keiretsu Forum's NCR, Bengaluru and Chennai chapters), and a group of HNIs like Alan Gertner, who is a founding member of Google's first Global Business Strategy team and Akshay Saxena, an Ashoka Fellow and president of Avanti.

Last November, it raised money in the second round from the US-based New Horizon Ventures, ThinKuvate of Singapore and existing investor Keiretsu Forum, apart from Axiomatic Ventures, and Inflection Point Ventures.