India’s leading venture seed fund supporting startups innovating for the masses, Unitus Seed Fund has announced StartHealth Competition, a nationwide challenge to identify promising early-stage health-tech startups. The company is focusing primarily on the start-ups aimed on serving India’s 20 crore families living on under Rs20,000 per month.
The strategy has been adopted by Unitus to find out young talent and invest on out-of-the box ideas to serve mankind.
Elaborating on the same, Dave Richards, Managing Partner, Unitus Seed Fund said, “Technology innovation is a key factor to making better healthcare services accessible and affordable for the masses in India.” He further explained, “This competition is intended to help strengthen dozens of promising health-tech startups and to shine a spotlight on some of the best.”The winner of the competition is expected to receive a cash prize of Rs10 lakhs. Additionally, the winner and the runner-up will get an opportunity to pitch for a direct entry to the StartHealth program, which includes receiving up to Rs50 lakhs of non-dilutive fund, support from StartHealth program partners Unitus, PATH, Pfizer, Manipal Hospitals and Narayana Health and a potential seed investment of Rs1 crore.
Open for health-tech innovators
Significantly, the competition is open for all start-up entrepreneurs who have innovative ideas to serve mankind. Innovative entrepreneurs from sectors including medical devices, diagnostics and therapeutics, mobile monitoring, online marketplaces, app-based services and enterprise management and healthcare service delivery may grab the opportunity to participate in the competition, but, the participants musthave technological innovation and increased mobile-internet penetration as the key idea.
Reportedly, the start-ups will be assessed based on factors including impact on India’s masses, leadership and team effort, apart from innovation, business model and presentation quality.
One can check the competition details from the official website of Unitus Seed Funds.
Interestingly, in early 2015, Unitus Seed Fund, Pfizer Inc., PATH, Manipal Hospitals, and Narayana Health launched StartHealth, an innovative program to provide up to Rs10 crore grants and investments to early stage start-ups, seeking to enhance access to affordable technology-driven healthcare products and services for the low-income class Indians.
