Practo goes global: Indian healthcare app forays into Brazil after conquering Asia

Photo credit: Pixabay.

Indian healthcare app Practo today launches in Brazil – South America’s largest market. The Bangalore-based startup had earlier expanded across Asia to Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Practo has two main products – Practo Search, which helps consumers find doctors, and Practo Ray, which is a cloud-based software to help doctors manage their patients. Both the products will initially be available in Portuguese and English in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s most populous city.

According to Practo founder and CEO Shashank ND, the healthcare-related issues that the startup attempts to solve are similar in India and other markets it operates in.

The company sees a market worth US$200 billion in Brazil – the world’s fifth largest economy with a population of about 200 million. “To put that into context, the market in India is around US$100 billion,” Shashank tells Tech in Asia. “While the healthcare spend (market) is huge, the out-of-pocket expenses of people for health-related issues are high too.” High out-of-pocket expense means that consumers are spending 60 percent of their healthcare costs from their own pockets and not through public health grants or insurance.

Doctors in Brazil too are poorly served currently. “There is no real new age cloud-based end-to-end software available to doctors in Brazil,” says Shashank. “Doctors end up using multiple software products to achieve what Practo Ray can solve single-handedly. So we see a huge opportunity there. We’re seeing great interest from doctors there already.”

Over 5,500 verified doctors, covering nearly half the clinics in Sao Paulo, are already on the app and website. Practo aims to reach Rio de Janeiro and other Brazilian cities in the second half of the year.

First the plumbing, then the expansion

Photo credit: Care hospitals Hyderabad

Practo has been in hyper growth mode since its US$90 million series C funding led by Tencent in August last year. As much as the size of the funding, which is impressive for a healthtech startup, the lineup of investors is a who’s who: Sequoia, Google Capital, Yuri Milner, Sofina, Altimeter, and Matrix, apart from Tencent.

Besides expanding, Practo has been on a mission to become an all-in-one healthcare app, broadening its scope to connect with hospitals, diagnostic labs, and wellness centers. To do this faster, it had a series of strategic acquisitions, the biggest of which was Qikwell, a hospital appointment scheduler.

“We have been doing a lot of plumbing. Now we have a very good base. We delayed our global launch for a while to build a strong base first,” Shashank told Tech in Asia in an earlier interview.

Global success stories out of India have mostly involved B2B startups, such as customer support software maker Freshdesk. Restaurant discovery app Zomato is a consumer-facing global player from India, but it has recently run into rough weather and laid off employees.

Practo is thus breaking new ground as a hybrid startup going global from India – its SaaS product Practo Ray is B2B, whereas Practo Search is B2C.