Mfine raises $1.5 million from Stellaris Venture

Mfine, a new on-demand doctor consultation start-up by two former Myntra executives, has raised $1.5 million from venture capital firm Stellaris Venture Partners.

Healthcare entrepreneurs Mayur Abhaya and Rohit M.A. also participated in the funding round.

Stellaris partner Ritesh Banglani has joined the board of Novocura Tech Health Services Pvt Ltd, which owns Mfine.

Mfine was started in February by Myntra co-founder Ashutosh Lawania and Prasad Kompalli, a former technology and business head at Myntra. Lawania and Kompalli, who left Myntra last year, were joined by former Myntra chief technology officer Ajit Narayanan, Arjun Chaudhary, who was head of digital marketing at the online fashion retailer, and Dr. Jagadish Prasad, a neuro-radiologist and founder of Femiint Health, a hospital in Bengaluru.

Mfine now employs roughly 35 people in engineering, marketing and business development.

The company will launch its app in Bengaluru this month, Kompalli said. It will offer remote, on-demand consultation with doctors at hospital chains and single hospitals in the city.

Mfine will keep a cut of the consultations on its platform and has signed up other revenue-sharing arrangements with hospitals, Lawania said.

Mfine will also have an app for doctors—the idea is similar to Uber’s which has apps for both drivers and riders—to enable them to chat via text or video with patients.

The app will offer suggestions to doctors on diagnosis. Mfine’s tech platform has crunched healthcare data from publicly available sources and ontologies to come up with suggestions on diagnosis and treatment.

Kompalli said the diagnosis suggestions of the platform will improve once customers start using the app, as it does with other internet platforms which get better as they get more and more data.

“We believe healthcare is trust-based and localised. Patients want to go to trusted and reputed brands so that’s why we’ve decided to tie up only with hospital chains and well-known (single) hospitals. We won’t be working with smaller clinics,” Kompalli said.

Mfine is the second healthcare start-up by former Myntra executives. Another, CureFit Healthcare Pvt. Ltd, which is run by Myntra co-founder Mukesh Bansal and former chief business officer of Flipkart Ankit Nagori, has already raised roughly $45 million, a year after starting out. While CureFit currently offers fitness services only, it plans to launch healthcare services later, and will end up competing with Mfine. Another rival for Mfine is Practo, India’s largest doctor discovery start-up.