Meet The New-Age Techie Caretaker Who Made it to The Entrepreneur India's 35U35 List How with an AI-based startup, this entrepreneur pledges to revolutionize the health-tech space

Blenders Pride Reserve Collection presents Entrepreneur's 35U35 list included some path-breaking names from the field of entrepreneurship and the new-age Techie Caretaker, Srikanth Samudrala, made it to the list owing to the AI-based health tech startup he co-founded.

Since his college days, 33-year-old Srikanth Samudrala wanted to start his own business. After graduating from IIT Madras in 2007 and working in the corporate world in senior technology roles for seven years, Srikanth took the leap, quit his job and started his own venture in 2014 to develop a social networking portal on the lines of Facebook. Srikanth says, "It could not take off, and, thus, I had my first stint with failure in the business world."

Srikanth, thereafter, banking on his rich IT experience, started providing IT consultancy to various startups in Pune and Hyderabad. As this went on for a year, Srikanth says he met Kiran Kalakuntla— the founder of eKincare—through a common friend. He says, "Kiran had founded eKincare six months before I met him. He had developed it to help his old parents with medical facilities in India while he studied abroad." On hearing it, Srikanth says he really liked the idea, and decided to partner with Kiran immediately.

Today, with the duo at the helm, eKincare—an artificial intelligence driven B2B corporate wellness platform —is going strong on its journey of becoming bigger, better and newer. At present, it serves 100 corporates as its customers, employs 85 people and expects to clock a turnover of $1 million ARR this year.

Srikanth says, "Our wellness platform integrates medical records of a company's employees and health care services to design wellness plans for the employees, which in turn, reduces company's expenditure toward its employees' health."

The beginnings
eKincare, however, started on a B2C model with a seed investment of $200,000 in 2014. The company followed the model for a year-and-a-half before realizing that people in India were not ready for a personalized product that helps them take care of their health. "We had to shift our strategy 180 degrees. We did that in 2016, and shifted our focus to corporates, which we believed could benefit from our product," Srikanth says.

In the pink of health
The company so far has raised a total of $2 million investment, and is now aiming for skies. For the coming year, eKincare is looking to grow at thrice the rate it grew last year. "As far as I can gauge, it seems we are going well on the path for achieving the same," he concludes.

(This article appears in the February 2019 issue of Entrepreneur Magazine. To subscribe, click here. You can buy our tablet version from Magzter.com. To visit our Archives, click here.)