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 expand to Mumbai, Pune and Kolkata in the coming months.
Insta Health Acquisition
Less than two weeks ago, Practo acquired Insta Health Solutions, an end to end cloud hospital info management solution for $12 million. Insta Health will operate as a separate division led by Ramesh Emani, Founder & CEO of Insta Health. The acquisition will provide Practo a global customer base along with the Insta Health product and its team. It will also provide an option for hospitals using Insta Health to integrate with the Practo platform, enabling doctor search, doctor availability, booking and health record access across Practo’s mobile app and web.
Expansion to Indonesia
Earlier this month, Practo entered the Indonesia market, launching its first product called Practo Search, available in Indonesian Bahasa and English. Practo said that consumers in Indonesia would be able to search for over 4,200 verified doctors in over 60% of all clinics across Jakarta DKI using the website or app, both of which had been built specially for the region.
Funding from Tencent, Sofina and others
Last month, the company raised $90 million in a Series C funding round led by Tencent and Sofina with existing investor Sequoia Capital. Google Capital, Altimeter Capital, Matrix Partners and DST Global founder Yuri Milner also participated in the round. This round valued Practo’s total funding at $125 million.
Genii acquisition, eyeing the enterprise segment
In July, Practo acquired Mumbai based product and development firm Genii for an undisclosed sum. The entire Genii team, including the founders, joined Practo in Bangalore. Practo planned to foray into the enterprise segment which would include hospitals and diagnostic centres. Practo claimed that it would expand the number of hospitals on its platform from 8,000 to over 20,000 by the end of this year.
Diagnostic centres search
In the same month, Practo added diagnostic centers to its platform which would allow users to search for medical test centers near them. Users would be provided accreditation information to determine the quality of the lab, check if home pickup facility is available, prices for different tests conducted by the lab, and photographs of the lab facility.
FitHo acquisition
In April, Practo acquired digital fitness solution FitHo to start offering preventive healthcare solutions to its users. Shashank ND, cofounder and CEO of Practo, informed MediaNama that the FitHo deal was a cash plus equity deal, but did not reveal the size of the deal.
Image Credit: Flickr user Michel Rios
