Practo closes 5th acquisition in 2 years in massive enterprise push

Shashank ND, founder and CEO of Practo (center) flanked by Enlightiks co-founders Vamsi Chandra Kasivajjala (on the left), and Venkatesh Pagidimarri. Photo credit: Practo. 

Online healthcare platform Practo has acquired Bangalore-based analytics firm Enlightiks in a stock and cash deal. The acquisition will let Practo provide hospitals with accurate predictions on profit and loss and user behavior, as well as billing systems, besides the day-to-day management tool it currently provides.

The 50-odd engineers at Enlightiks will be absorbed into Practo to form the Analytics Business Unit, which will be headed by co-founder and CEO of the acquired startup, Vamsi Chandra Kasivajjala. Practo declined to share the deal size when Tech in Asia asked.

Practo claims to aggregate over 200,000 doctors, across a network of 10,000 hospitals, 8,000 diagnostic centers, and 4,000 wellness and fitness centers in India, Brazil, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore.

The five-year-old startup does everything from connecting patients to doctors, helping clinics manage their customers, and creating customized fitness digital products.

Enlightiks’ analytics solutions could be the piece that completes Practo’s enterprise puzzle.

Including Enlightiks, three of Practo’s five acquisitions in the last two years offer tech solutions for healthcare institutions.

In September 2015, the healthcare startup acquired Insta Health Solutions, which provides cloud-based management of hospital information. Its software allows users to find information about doctor availability and make instant bookings.

That same month, it bought Qikwell, an acquisition that helped Practo allow appointment booking and contactless payment while reducing waiting time. The app manages over 40 million appointments every year, the company claims.

Practo’s acquisition of Enlightiks is the logical next step in its long quest to reach out to healthcare enterprises. Enlightiks’ cloud-based platform Querent uses predictive and cognitive tools to compute business risks. It’s used by over 200 hospitals and clinics in India, such as Apollo Sugar Clinics and Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital. With the acquisition, Practo will directly get access to these healthcare institutions.

“With Querent, we will be able to help CXOs make their enterprises run more efficiently, which should improve the overall quality of care while making it more affordable,” said Practo founder and CEO Shashank ND said. Deploying Querent will allow Practo to combine machine learning with analytics to gain useful insights into hospital management.

For instance, if a doctor increases consultation fees, hospitals can compute the impact on margins. The system also offers options based on the data, listing out scenarios and routes to achieve a profit target.

Practo has to date raised US$124 million from the likes of China’s Tencent, Google Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Matrix Partners, making it one of the most well-funded healthcare startups in India.

Practo’s revenue for the year ended March 2016 increased tenfold to US$4.4 million. But losses, mainly on expenses, also increased – by 30 percent, at US$1.9 million. For now, the company is in a healthy state where revenue is increasing more than the expenses, despite a number of acquisitions by Practo.