Practo, the Sequoia-backed healthcare app which lets you conveniently scout for doctors in your location, has today announced the acquisition of software firm Genii. With this acqui-hire, Practo aims to enter a largely untapped enterprise healthcare vertical.
This will be Practo’s second major acquisition, after it earlier acquired digital fitness platform Fitho Wellness for an undisclosed sum.
Fitho claims to have more than 2 million people using its services every year across the globe. The acquisition was also with the intention of packing Practo’s app with all the health-related offerings and hence make it a one-stop health and fitness solution, which is pretty much the strategy behind the current Genii acquisition as well.
Talking about the latest acquisition, Practo CEO Shashank ND said,
This is the second of several acquisitions we are exploring. It is the stepping stone to enter the enterprise segment.
Genii, is a three-year old software service firm based out of Mumbai, which has developed ecommerce portals and cloud platforms across retail, media, finance and other industries for clients including Axis Bank, Mediassist and others.
Shashank further adds,
I look forward to significantly accelerating our product roadmap for the enterprise segment as we look to build impactful products.
Post this acquisition, Practo is looking to grow the number of hospitals on its platform from the current 8,000 to over 20,000 by the end of the year.
Acquisitions have more recently become a sort of trend in India’s capital-rich startup ecosystem. Quite a lot of Indian startups, who have managed to raised decent funding rounds, have been acquiring smaller, tech-driven companies to build their own digital platforms.
These acquisition targets aren’t limited to just building platforms though, as has been made clear by Zomato’s recently concluded acquisition spree. While Zomato is more on a global context, within India too, startups have been merging and acquiring smaller rivals (look for Ola’s TFS acquisition, or Housing’s numerous real-estate based acquisitions) to scale up their own platforms.
And Practo’s Founder Shashank, too is of the view that acquisitions are perhaps the way forward for Practo. He says,
We believe acquisitions are a fantastic way to add world class like-minded talent to our team. It gives us a fast way to scale and the ability to further accelerate our roadmap. We continue to look at acquiring great talent and technology to build products that will help billions of people make better healthcare decisions every day.
Interesting trend this is turning out to be.
