Sukino’s $31 million round signals shift toward post-hospital care
Investors are betting on asset-light, high-margin models that provide cheaper alternatives to hospital stays while maintaining clinical rigour.
BENGALURU : Venture capital and private equity investors are increasing their bets on post-hospital care—often referred to as ‘continuum care’—as India’s hospitals are discharging patients more quickly and families seek structured recovery outside hospitals. The latest and one of the larger recent deals in this space is Sukino’s $31 million Series B round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Zerodha-backed Rainmatter.
Sukino, which operates out-of-hospital recovery centres, had earlier raised a ₹50 crore Series A round led by Stakeboat Capital in 2024, following angel funding from the family offices of Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan and Aarin Capital chairman Mohandas Pai.
Sukino operates out-of-hospital recovery centres in Bengaluru, Kochi, and Coimbatore, and is profitable at the group level, its founder and chief executive Rajinish Menon said in an interview with Mint.
He said the chain currently operates about 850 beds across 11 centres in South India. With the new funding, he said the first phase of expansion will focus on the metros in South India before moving to tier I markets.
“The first phase of the investments…will be to catch up or build more in the metro cities with Hyderabad and Chennai and then go to the tier I cities of South India as well," Menon said, naming Calicut, Trivandrum, Mysuru, Hubli-Dharwad, Belgaum, Vizag and Trichy among target markets.
Sukino plans to add 22 more centres over the next two years, Menon said, adding that most of its expansion follows an asset-light model in which landlords invest in the build-out and Sukino signs long leases.
Asset light road map
Menon said Sukino is less of a ‘home care’ company and more of a hospital-like transition-care setup that takes over after acute treatment, while keeping costs lower than a hospital stay.
“Acute care is still done by the hospitals, but we are beyond acute care. The idea is to…expand to more and more clinical matters that we can take care of so that people tend to get a wholesome basket of post-hospitalization care services," Menon said.
- Sukino’s $31 million Series B is a major deal for India’s nascent continuum care market.
- Large hospitals are pivoting to higher bed-turnover, pushing recovery care into specialized third-party centres.
- With daily patient costs of ₹7,000–8,000, investors see a path to ₹1,000 crore revenue at 5,000 beds.
- Companies are using landlord-funded build-outs to scale rapidly across South Indian metros and tier I cities.
- Future growth for profitable players like Sukino is expected to come from bank leverage rather than just equity.
Sukino’s round comes as more investors test bets in adjacent parts of the post-hospital and senior-care market, backing everything from care-at-home and recovery services to consumer platforms for seniors.
In January 2025, private equity firm InvAscent invested ₹110 crore in Chennai-based Geri Care Health Services for a minority stake, marking the company’s first institutional fundraise.
Also in 2024, out-of-hospital geriatric care provider Kites Senior Care raised ₹45 crore in a Series A round led by Ranjan Pai’s family office, while senior-focused platform Khyaal raised $4.2 million in a seed round co-led by 62Ventures, SVQuad and Inventus Capital Partners in the same year.
Vishal Gupta, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, said that the fund’s bet on Sukino is part of a broader push to build a portfolio of ‘single speciality’ healthcare companies, having backed firms such as dialysis chain NephroPlus and Pluro, a fertility platform that partners with standalone In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) clinics.
He said Bessemer backed Sukino because it expects ‘transition care’ outside hospitals to become more important as hospitals shorten stays, particularly for stroke, cardiac and complex orthopaedic cases where recovery in the first few weeks after discharge can shape outcomes.
Specialisation thesis
Gupta said the Series B round is intended to fund Sukino’s next stage of scale-up, while maintaining a capital-efficient model. “This finances the company to get from 800…to 3,000 plus beds," he said.
He also explained that Sukino offers care ‘at a fraction of that cost’, compared to hospital beds, which he said works for both insurers and out-of-pocket customers while still leaving room for healthy margins.
Gupta also laid out a simple back-of-the-envelope view of how the model scales with occupancy and length of stay. “Each patient on average pays somewhere between ₹7,000 to ₹8,000 a day and stays 50 to 60 days…so if you have 5,000 beds with certain occupancy, you can build a ₹1,000 crore revenue company very quickly over the next few years," he said.
Mohandas Pai, chairman at Aarin Capital, told Mint that the opportunity is opening up because both costs and incentives are changing inside hospitals. Pai said hospital care has become expensive, and that hospitals, which earn more from procedures, have limited incentive to keep patients for long recovery once the surgery is done.
As a result, longer rehabilitation and post-operative support are increasingly shifting to specialised facilities that offer what he called ‘continuum care’, which can be cheaper for patients than an extended hospital stay.
Pai also said Sukino’s near-term playbook should be to dominate Bengaluru before pushing harder into other markets. He said Bengaluru would be the ‘dominant theme’ for the next two years as the company builds meaningful market share in a large and growing market.
Regarding future funding, Pai said the company’s next phase of expansion will likely require leverage, rather than solely equity capital.
Using profitability
“Because this is an operating base where you have to build out…they don’t have any leverage. So, I’m sure bank funding will come to them in the future, because bank funding follows only after profitability. So, this equity round helps them make sure that they have got a good equity to get more leverage to get bank funding, which will enable them to grow," Pai said.
Venkat Subramanyam, founder and executive chairman at Veda Corporate Advisors, said Sukino’s fundraise landed well with investors because it sits in a clear category—continuum care—and has demonstrated unit economics at existing centres, at a time when many scaled-up businesses are still struggling to turn profitable.
He added that exceptional founder credentials and a strong marquee cap table also helped build confidence and draw interest from multiple large investors.
“The quality of the cap table…resonated very strongly…which is why we were able to draw a very high degree of interest from the markets," he added.
Industry observers, however, have cautioned investors against confusing continuum care with senior living, arguing that the former is a clinical extension of hospital care for patients who still require active support but don’t need to stay in a high-intensity hospital setting.
Some experts predict that the category will likely attract more capital, but large-scale consolidation may still be in its early stages, with niche, small-scale acquisitions more likely in the near term.
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