Curelink raises $3.5 million in funding led by Elevation Capital and Venture Highway

CureLink, a health-tech platform that connects doctors with patients via WhatsApp, said it has raised $3.5 million in seed funding led by Elevation Capital and Venture Highway. The company said the new funds will be used for product, development and hiring of wellness professionals in functions such as geographic expansion and diversification of services in various medical specializations such as dermatology, pediatrics and psychiatry.

The round included Digital Sparrow Capital and Vijay Shekhar Sharma (Paytm), Ankush Sachdeva and Fareed Ahsan (ShareChat), Gaurav Agarwal, Prashant Tandon (Tata 1 MG), Rajat K Dhawan (McKinsey), Rohit MA (Cloudnine), Ritesh Malik (Innov8) ) and Harsh Mahajan (Mahajan Imaging) etc.

Founded in 2021 by Aman Singla and Divyansh Jain, CureLink seeks to reinvent chronic care management for millions of Indians in Tier II cities and beyond. The company claims that nearly 90% of out-of-clinic interactions in the healthcare industry happen on WhatsApp.

“Curelink is based on this behavior and allows doctors to communicate and automatically engage with their patients—all within WhatsApp,” the release said.

The doctor-patient ratio in India is 1:1456 and doctors spend an average of 2 minutes with a patient. So doctors in India are burdened with large numbers of patients and given time constraints, they have to provide strategic, immediate advice (such as medication dosages) rather than training their patients to better manage their condition. must be given priority.

“Today, 200 million people have incurable diseases like high blood pressure, PCOS and diabetes. Many of these people, especially those who are older or don’t spend a lot of time on the Internet, are unlikely to download a separate app to manage their health issues. However, they are comfortable using WhatsApp to communicate with familiar medical professionals,” said Aman Singla, cofounder, CureLink.

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CureLink is currently active in Gurgaon and Bhopal and plans to expand further into Delhi NCR, and experiment with the next tier of cities such as Lucknow and Jaipur by the end of 2022.

The release said that the number of messages on the platform has seen an increase of around 150% month-on-month.

“Doctors are the centerpiece of healthcare delivery in India, and CureLink’s model of being a trusted ally for doctors resonates with us immediately. The team is hyper-focused on their stakeholders, which is evident in the design choices they make. The clear is: to be WhatsApp-first for patients, enable private and contextual consultations for doctors, and focus solely on outcomes,” said Vasudha Wadhera, Vice President – ​​Elevation Capital.

“India needs Telehealth 2.0. Serious health conditions require constant supervision and management, but due to limited bandwidth, doctors are often unable to stay updated on the progress of their patients,” said Sameer Sood, founding partner, Venture Highway.

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Originally published at Pen 18