Early-stage healthcare-focused venture capital firm W Health Ventures is looking for bolder bets with its second fund, building companies from the ground up in areas like oncology, longevity, and chronic pain management, managing partner Pankaj Jethwani told Mint in an interview.
The firm on Thursday announced the initial close of its Fund II at ₹550 crore, aiming for ₹630 crore. The fund is about 87% subscribed, and the firm hopes to announce the final close shortly, Jethwani said.
W Health Ventures has already been deploying capital from its second fund, with its first company, Everhope Oncology, launched in March. Everhope was launched in partnership with the hospital chain Narayana Health to reimagine cancer care in India.
“The patient experience in oncology is the same as though it was 20 years ago in India,” said Jethwani, explaining that quality cancer care is still concentrated in specific centres of excellence and private spaces which are not accessible to most patients.
“Most Indian patients with cancer are getting fairly dated treatment. What this platform allows us to do is to work with leading oncosurgeons and medical oncologists and the like to not only build high-quality centres and fill them up with patients, but provide an extremely high-quality patient experience,” he said.
Everhope is leveraging AI to serve as a companion for cancer patients and aid doctors on their individual journeys, said Jethwani, adding that the system needs a ‘shake-up’.
They are building greenfield and brownfield centres starting with Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Delhi for Everhope and aim to reach 30,000 cancer patients this year.
- Fund II has reached a first close of ₹550 crore, targeting a total of ₹630 crore.
- Focus on company creation over series A/B investing.
- Plans to seed 8–10 startups with ₹30–50 crore each over the next four years.
- Oncology, longevity, chronic pain, and AI-enabled B2B services.
- Aims to grow from 25 million patients currently served by Fund I to 1 billion lives over 20 years.
A similar shake-up is required in several other areas in healthcare, according to Jethwani.
The fund is exploring opportunities in longevity, modern preventive health, geriatrics, and chronic pain management.
“...with sectors like financial services or consumer, India is leading in many ways, but in a lot of sectors, think of deeptech, biotech innovation, healthcare—we are 15-20 years behind,” said Jethwani.
“What the experience is with oncology is true for many other spaces like pain management, obesity management, or mental health…the opportunity we are targeting is a generational opportunity,” he said.
Ground-up approach
W Health Ventures is sticking to its ground-up approach, of identifying white spaces and then partnering with founders to build a company. The firm plans to build and scale 8 to 10 new companies over the next four years, investing ₹30-50 crore in each incubation.
Jethwani said that company creation gives them the time to research and design companies from scratch to take bold bets, and that they look to the East and West for inspiration, as well as for mistakes to anticipate and avoid.
“The generational opportunity for us is we have a time machine, which is a flight ticket,” he said. “You fly to China or the US. You know what the future of healthcare delivery can look like.”
The firm’s focus for all its companies is single-speciality health in India and B2B AI-enabled services in the India-US corridor.
Its Fund I companies include Nivaan (chronic pain), BeatO (diabetes), ElevateNow (obesity), BabyMD (paediatrics), and Mylo (parenting) in India, along with cross-border companies like Wysa (AI mental health services) and Reveal HealthTech (AI transformation services), which have all raised external growth capital.
“Fund 1 companies today serve about 25 million patients, we're hoping that we'll get to a billion lives in the next couple of decades,” said Jethwani.
Mint reported on W Health Venture’s initial fund II close in July.