Doctor discovery platform Practo has acquired its fourth company this year: Qikwell, a Bangalore based doctor discovery and booking platform, for an undisclosed amount. The latter will continue to be led by Krishna Prasad, co-founder and CEO, and Raghavendra Prasad, co-founder and CPO of Qikwell. The acquisition will allow Practo to get Qikwell’s technology to improve its consumer experience of hospital and clinic booking, with ‘contactless payment’. Practo will use Qikwell’s proprietary technology and algorithms to synchronise patients, doctors, office staff at the hospital to reduce average wait time by three times. The acquisition, Practo claims, makes it the world’s largest appointment booking platform, with 40 million managed appointments yearly. Qikwell was founded by Krishna Prasad and Raghavendra Prasad in 2011 and had over 100 employees. It claims to to have listed 250 hospitals including Manipal, Fortis and Narayana Hrudalaya in 19 cities, along with over 6,000 doctors across streams of medicine. In November last year, Qikwell raised Rs 18 crore (~ $2.7 million) in Series A funding from SAIF Partners, and Rs 1.2 crore in angel funding (~$180,000) from a group of investors, including Amit Somani, Sunil Kalra and Alok Mittal. At that time, the company claimed to have booked 1 million appointments and facilitated over 100,000 patient-doctor engagements every month by then. Interestingly, a Mint report from last month quoted Krishna Prasad denying that Qikwell was in talks to merge with Practo. The report added that from its branches in Chennai, Hyderabad and Delhi, the company planned to…
