'Menace suicide': IIT Kanpur graduate takes cue from his ill-fated investment which was so full of promise

What does one do when a fat-checked startup, backed by top VCs and based on a high-impact cause, fails to cut it? IITian Harsh Pokharna, now a CEO, just took to Instagram to talk about the tough lessons he had learned after a health-tech startup in which he had invested shut shop. His brutally frank rehash has since been passed around, not necessarily due to its candor, but because it makes it seem so easy for whoever is attempting to gain entry into India's notoriously recalcitrant health care market.

He mentioned that he had invested in the health-tech venture in 2020. The venture was meant to be a cancer hospital aggregator, with an online platform offering patients the amenity to look for treatment options, consult oncologists online, and make a decision on where to get treated. With more than $7 million in investors on board and 25,000+ monthly users and more than 1,000 unique cancer patient leads as organic growth, the start-up had all the makings of a high-growth business. But even with these figures, it was unable to succeed. "We really believed that hospitals would recognize the value in owning or partnering with a company like this," Pokharna wrote. "But that did not pan out either."

Key takeaways that he learned

Pokharna states that the failure was not a result of the absence of vision or execution—it was structural reality in Indian healthcare. In his post, he enumerated three main takeaways that founders (and investors) should remember:

- Hospitals have all the negotiating power

To Harsh, aggregator websites are wonderful on paper but end up being entirely at the mercy of hospitals. They hold payments outstanding, ignore contracts, and consume any margin on compliance and collection fees. Hospitals do not need middlemen at all.

Digital-only does not work (yet)

The Indian consumer will not pay for healthcare services online, says Harsh. Online technologies are great at generation but do not know how to run a business.

Offline is required—and costly

Indian customers still value offline bookings and brick-and-mortar centres. But offline infrastructure is a Hercules task. It takes 12–24 months for a centre to breakeven and has massive initial expenses, states Pokharna. If a startup lacks the ability to make offline investments at scale, it is stuck.

His takeaway of the day?

For Pokharna, the take-away lesson is straightforward but ominous: healthcare startups wishing to be aggregators tread a thin edge. Without influencers and differentiators, they will be feeble middlemen—with zero margins, no survival, and no respite. He warned that building an aggregator-only firm in Indian healthcare is a gambler's offer. Unless there are smart solutions to the structural ills in the sector, founders will be dead certain to fail.

As Pokharna himself would categorically mention, it might be a good pitch deck, but beware lest it be business suicide.