How This Indian Health-tech Startup Roped in Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone Visit has raised a new round of funding from Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone.
By Nidhi Singh
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For the founders of Delhi-based AI startup Visit, it is easily the happiest time of their lives. Founded in 2016 by Anurag Prasad, Vaibhav Singh, Chetan Anand and Shashvat Tripathi, the health-tech startup announced that it has raised a new round of funding from Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone. The funding round was led by Stone in his personal capacity.
The round also saw the participation of Blue Jeans Network Co-founder & CTO, Alagu Periyanann; Snapdeal Co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal; Karthee Madasamy, Former Managing Director Qualcomm Ventures India and Murugappa Group's Muthu Murugappan.
Nostalgic Investment:
In an exclusive conversation with Entrepreneur India, Visit's co-founder Anurag Prasad confirmed the investment adding that the company keeps reaching out to a lot of influential people in India and in the Silicon Valley.
Anurag Prasad with Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone
"We also reach out to people directly and they end up liking our concept. That's how we reached out to Stone as well, through networking. He is really a great guy. He really liked the concept because it's similar to his previous startup Jelly, a human-powered search engine. He used the same technology we are building right now."
Prasad reached out to Stone over email after which he committed to invest in Visit.
Diagnose Medical Conditions:
He added that Visit helps people with the health aspect but Jelly was the broader version of it. Visit is an AI-driven chatbot that helps in diagnosing your health condition within minutes.
"The chatbot helps users understand their medical condition, read further and then connects them (over video/phone/chat) to the right physician or specialist based on the condition for further prescriptions/counseling. It also tracks user's activity, sleep, calories and fitness data to help them reach their goals with continuous reminders, insights and motivation," explained Prasad.
A Long Way to Go:
The investment will help Visit continue building out their Telemedicine App, offering AI driven diagnosis to help achieve the mission of democratizing healthcare. The startup aims to reach a million more users in 2018 and become the go-to app for quality health advice.
According to company information, Visit has received over 200,000 chat conversations and handles about 1500 daily chat queries ranging from general health, medicines, skin problems, diet/nutrition and gynaecology.
Some of India's top employers and Health Insurances — Times Group, Rolls Royce, HDFC AMC, Wipro CCLG, Religare Health Insurance work with Visit to make the platform available to their employees and subscribers as a health benefit.
Fixing the Primary Care Network:
For Prasad the hardest objection with Indian investors has been that there hasn't been any successful telemedicine company in India. So that is the only concern from investors' side as in what is Visit doing differently.
"We have unique AI- driven approach which kind of worked for us. We think primary care in India is broken and we can fix it with our AI enabled primary care network," concluded Prasad.
