Practo is India’s buzziest healthcare company and arguably India’s #1 healthcare app. Since starting off as a humble online appointment scheduler app for doctors in 2008, Practo now aspires to be a single-window solution for all things concerning health in India – from online health records to an end-to-end hospital management system to an e-pharmacy to a marketplace for fitness and assorted preventive healthcare services. Like most pies in the sky, the size of the Indian healthcare market falls under a “pick an arbitrary big number” category – in this case, the numbers bandied about range from $100 billion to $280 billion. Do Practo’s actual numbers justify all the buzz?

What has Practo been up to, the last year?
Using the tried-and-test template of heavily-funded startups such as US-based Zocdoc.and China’s Guahao, Practo has been on a tear as far as fundraising is concerned raising $90 million in August 2015 from a clutch of new investors including Tencent, Sofina, Google Capital, and Altimeter Capital to add to their existing investors like Sequoia India and Matrix Partners from whom they had already raised over $30 million.

The company now claims to connect “millions of patients to over 200,000 healthcare practitioners, 200,000 doctors, 10,000 hospitals, 8,000 diagnostic centres and 4,000 fitness and wellness centres on its platform”. In addition to expanding to over 100 Indian cities and 15 countries beyond India, Practo launched a slew of new services including Practo Consult, an online consultation platform and Practo Order for online medicine ordering. The company now employs over 1,500 people and claims to have a 90% market share for its core product, Practo Ray, a cloud-based clinic management software.

On the back of this, Practo aims to “fundamentally disrupt healthcare access and delivery” and claims that “certain parts of its business are already profitable with a path to achieve full profitability by next year.”

Results:

Rs 156 crore: Revenue recorded by business operations in FY16. It made Rs 25 crore the previous year.

Rs 65 crore: Losses Practo chalked up in FY16. It lost Rs 13 crore in FY15.

Rs 133 crore: Revenue received from Practo Pte, the holding company in Singapore, for providing “software development and support services”. So basically 85% of Practo’s revenue is artificial – mandated by fiat rather than earned through authentic business operations in the market. The corresponding figure for FY15 was Rs 19 crore.

Rs 23 crore: Actual business revenue recognized for FY16 by Practo after deducting the fees received from its holding company. The corresponding figure for FY15 for these subscription revenues was Rs 6 crore. To put this figure in perspective, the revenue for the year FY16 was less than 3% of the total funding raised so far. At an implied monthly run rate of Rs 2 crore, one suspects it might be a little difficult for a 1,500-strong startup to be anywhere close to profitability.

50,000: Number of doctors that Practo claims it has as paying customers.

Rs 60 crore:  Minimum revenue Practo should have made if it did have 50,000 paying customers – assuming that all the users are on the Rs 999 per month entry-level plan for Practo Ray.

Rs 27 crore: Trade receivables for FY16 – an unusually large number as it exceeds the total actual booked revenue for the year.

4: The number of acquisitions that Practo made during the year – first Fitho in April 2015, Genii in July 2015 and then Insta Health and Qikwell in September 2015. The company apparently paid $12m for Insta Health and $50m for Qikwell.

• Doctors
• Healthcare
• Practo