A startup that started off in a college dorm is now world’s largest healthcare appointment booking platform and manages nearly 40 million appointments every year. Practo is on an acquisition spree after its series C funding from Tencent. It has just acquired Qikwell, a start-up which provides appointments scheduling at hospitals. This is the fourth acquisition by Practo in last 5 months. The Deal size is still undisclosed, but the news was confirmed by Practo’s Co-founder Shashank N D on Twitter.
Excited to announce @Practo acquisition of @qikwell Now the largest healthcare appointment platform in the world https://t.co/TV0XOlqeW7 1/2
— Shashank ND (@shashanknd) September 24, 2015
Qikwell has developed a hospital appointment scheduling product that synchronises patients, doctors and hospital staff to provide better customer experience. The company also has a tool for contactless payments at hospitals. It claims to reduce the average wait time by factor to three, and provides technology to 250 hospitals including Fortis and Manipal.
“We are thrilled to join Practo in our quest to enable digital healthcare worldwide. To give an analogy, the way Indian Railways solved the problem of getting berths in the trains, we are solving it in the same way in hospitals,” said Krishna Prasad Chitrapura, co-founder and Chief Executive at Qikwell.
A former senior scientist at Yahoo, Mr. Chitrapura founded Qikwell in 2011 along with Raghavendra Prasad T.S., a former executive at multinational conglomerate Honeywell. At Practo, they will continue to lead Qikwell which has over 100 employees.
Practo claims to list 2,00000 healthcare practitioners on its service and enable 10 million searches a month. Practo has 1500 employees on its payroll. The company competes globally with players such as ZocDoc and DocDoc, will use the product to improve the booking experience across its entire platform. Practo raised $124 million from Tencant Holdings, Google capital, Sequoia and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. In April, Practo acquired FitHO, in July tech firm Genii and last week acquired Insta Health.