On a Thursday afternoon in September, the sun and the steady creep of the Covid-19 pandemic conspired to keep people off the streets of South Delhi’s posh Greater Kailash 1 (GK1) neighbourhood. S-490, one of the neighbourhood’s many large bungalows, was the exception to this. Inside were close to a dozen people. On the one hand, there were those who had come for the bungalow’s main business—a skincare studio. Scattered amongst them were a second group—patients of Pristyn Care, a new breed of healthcare startup.
The GK1 clinic is emblematic of how Pristyn, which promises smooth elective surgeries for patients, does business. Unlike traditional healthcare setups that incur huge rental, staffing, and equipment costs, the Gurugram-based startup looks to do more with less.
So, rather than springing for a clinic of its own, Pristyn’s happy to take up a few rooms within a larger business. The resource-sharing goes beyond just space. The skincare studio’s receptionist, for example, also handled Pristyn’s patients.
This approach extends beyond its clinics to the real bread-and-butter of the company—surgeries. After a consultation at one of its clinics, patients deemed to require surgical procedures are operated on by Pristyn’s doctors at third-party hospitals the startup has partnered with. Currently, the company claims to have tied up with 250 hospitals across 14 cities. These range from neighbourhood hospitals to even some within leading healthcare chains such as Apollo.
The company is the brainchild of Harsimarbir Singh, Vaibhav Kapoor, and Garima Sawhney. Kapoor and Sawhney are doctors—a general surgeon and a gynaecologist, respectively. Singh, meanwhile, has a business background. He has co-founded various companies and has also worked as a senior executive at payments company MobiKwik and services marketplace Urban Company.
In 2018, when Kapoor and Sawhney quit their hospital jobs to start their own clinic, Singh—a close friend of the doctor couple—proposed they start a company. “They did Pristyn’s very first surgeries; I brought the patients,” he says. That approach led to Pristyn conducting 250 surgeries—largely for procedures for haemorrhoids, hernia, fissures, and gynaecological issues—in four months.
“Large hospitals that have been in existence for over ten years do close to 300 such surgeries in a month. We achieved that between two surgeons in four months,” he said.
Pristyn has come a long way in the short time since. It has raised $27 million from a clutch of investors clutch of investors The Economic Times Pristyn Care raises $12 million Series B funding from Sequoia & others Read more , including Sequoia India.
