ImpactGuru, India’s most prominent healthcare, nonprofit and crowdfunding platform, recently raised a $2 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Apollo Hospitals Group and Venture Catalysts. Existing investor, RB investments, a VC fund based in Singapore, also participated in the funding round along with India’s largest health-tech fund, Currae Healthtech Fund. The investment round also saw the participation of several family offices from US, Southeast Asia and Middle East.
“Donation crowdfunding is a proven business model in US, UK, and China with platforms seeing exponential growth year on year. With this round of funding, ImpactGuru.com is well positioned to become the market leader in India,” said investor, Harsh Bothra from RB Investments.
The funds raised will serve to scale the company’s crowdfunding in India by driving up sales and marketing. The startup is also looking forward to improve its technology, especially by developing its machine learning, big data, AI and local language support.
The potential to use technology to crowdfund for help is limitless in the face of India’s accelerating smartphone, internet, and digital payments penetration,
said Piyush Jain, co-founder & CEO of ImpactGuru.
ImpactGuru is a tech-for-good platform that provides definite crowdfunding solutions to financially assist medical patients. Crowdfunding in the healthcare sector is a recurrent trend nowadays with people raising funds online for medical expenses. The funds are usually raised through social media campaigns led by the patient’s family or friends to sensitize and encourage individuals to financially assist their medically ill relative.
Crowdfunding is quite popular in India; backed by India’s 25 crore middle class population and the prevalent culture of donating. Additionally, 80% of the population does not have any health insurance and receiving credits is quite limited.
Since the deal was completed, Apollo Hospital Group will now use ImpactGuru’s platform as its preferred crowdfunding platform to cater patients’ financial needs, effective immediately. This strategic investment will also allow the prominent hospital group to increase awareness about crowdfunding as a solution to obtain affordable healthcare, especially to patients suffering from cancer or other costly diseases.
We will also pioneer the matching of CSR funds from within the group as well other organizations from outside along with the generosity of the crowd, as we are determined that no one should be denied access to quality care,
said Suneeta Reddy, MD, Apollo Hospitals.
Venture Catalysts played a significant role in bridging the company with the investors thanks to its extensive network of angel investors and family offices in the country, Southeast Asia and Middle East. Moreover, India’s first integrated incubator, helped the startup scale its donor base and create a willingness to carry out philanthropic works with its network of investors.
“Crowdfunding to solve India’s healthcare and nonprofit crisis is a disruptive innovation led by ImpactGuru.com. ImpactGuru.com has immense potential with banks / NBFCs unable to provide sufficient medical loans due to low credit scores, lack of collateral, high risk of death and default,” said co-founder & president of Venture Catalysts, Dr. Apoorv Ranjan Sharma.
Additionally, ImpactGuru possess an exclusive partnership with US and UK based GlobalGiving, which is the world’s first and biggest non-profit crowdfunding platform, and is the only crowdfunding platform in India that can offer tax benefits to international donors. The association has so far raised $16 Mn for several social causes in India since it began operating.
“Through the power of crowdfunding, ImpactGuru.com has often mobilized Rs 25 lakhs for cancer or transplant surgeries in 48 hours. As India’s healthcare out of pocket expenditure at ~60 percent is among the highest in the world, healthcare crowdfunding is a highly scalable solution given the low insurance penetration in our country,” said Apoorva Patni from Currae Healthtech Fund