What is missing from the tech founders building healthtech and medtech for the masses (not just the top 1% of Indians)?

Date: 02-01-2026 at 04:36

India is a funny country with its advantages and disadvantages. As 99% of the tech solutions are built in metro cities, almost every time the final products and services create zero economic value for end users from Bharat. If you built a solution suitable even for 1%, the chances are you may end up building a large company. This is especially true for Healthtech and Medtech products and services.

Two recent examples caught my attention recently:

Example A: A Continuous Care Platform charging INR 15,000/month with a minimum enrollment of 3 months. This means the customer needs to pay a minimum of INR 45,000 for management of a disease outside the hospital. The platform has a distinctive approach to manage chronic and multi-morbid conditions; the processes are at the intersection of wellness, lifestyle, and clinical care. However, when you think of the pricing, it is clear this is only for the top few % of Indians who can afford it (now and 5 years from now).

But let’s say the company converts the top 1% of Indians, which is approximately 1.5 Cr. Let’s assume the average revenue per year is only INR 50,000 — the company’s potential revenue can be INR 75,000 Cr/year, an amazing outcome for venture and shareholders.

But backing only such healthtech companies leaves the rest of Indians vulnerable, and that is in no way good news for India’s aspirations.

Example B: I know a Medtech startup incubated from IC IIT Patna and mentored by my mentor (Dr. Kamlesh Jha). I read about them and was super excited about the innovation and the product. In brief, the company has innovated a medical device that can give scores of four key health markers — Sugar, Gut, Respiratory, and Liver — just by mouth breathing, because our breath contains volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that reflect key health markers.

I was excited for the product because I thought this would be a great device for mass screening that could be used by frontline workers and healthcare professionals. But when I used the product, it left me thinking for the following reasons:

• In general, one screening requires 10 minutes (it takes 3 minutes to calibrate, a few minutes to collect the data that is mostly not available with the masses, a few more minutes to give results, and a few more minutes to make sense of those).

• It demands extra cognitive load from healthcare professionals due to the complexity of the technology (maybe in the future it will be solved).

• The pricing: the device costs INR 14,000.

  
  

Once I used the product, I was left unimpressed, and let me tell you why.

I as a Healthtech founder building for the masses (400 million), for me every single second mattered. If Jilo Health is offering a INR 199 Health Card that contains monthly free screening for a year and four free consultations, our entire focus is collecting as much data as we can in the least time so our AI tools can do the magic.

This helps us in two ways:

1. Give more data to healthcare professionals so they can save their time and reach a provisional diagnosis faster without, or with fewer, investigations.

2. A data-driven and AI-powered fast diagnosis allows us to reduce the consultation fee.

   
   

For example, let’s say we are paying INR 1,000 per hour to a Jilo Health specialist doctor with 15+ years of experience, and if the doctor can consult 10 patients, we bring down the consultation cost to INR 100 — which is almost impossible in an offline setting where consultation starts from scratch. Faster consultations and fewer investigations allow us to offer the card at that price point.

If we are taking 10 minutes to screen a user, we can screen 6 users in one hour, and if there is no conversion, we have to double the resources. In that case, our CAC will skyrocket and we won’t be able to offer the card at INR 199. But INR 199 is an amount the masses are okay to spend.

You see, it is not fancy technology; it is the sheer madness of optimizing every second so the cost can be reduced. Just to add, we used to take 5 minutes to screen one user; now we take 2.5 minutes, and we will bring it down to 2 minutes.

Just to add, we even tried IoT-driven devices (cost above one lakh) that automatically feed the data into the system — it takes more than 10 minutes to collect just the vitals that we collect in 1 minute.

I think this is what is missing currently from healthtech and medtech builders. If a solution is adding cost and time, it is just another fancy solution for India’s top 1%. But India needs affordable solutions that will come from building healthtech and medtech solutions while keeping 99% of Indians in mind. Without that, we are not moving as a nation from developing to developed.