MFine Success and Merger Story: The on-demand healthcare firm
Mfine has made a successful entry into the healthcare sector. For quite some time, the patient has become more and more the centre of attention in healthcare. The availability of affordable healthcare combined with sustainable mobility is fueling the growth of the health-tech sector. The healthcare delivery and funding landscape are improving, patients’ profiles are shifting, and the medical technology industry is expanding.
India’s healthcare system has a lot going for it on many fronts, despite all of its shortcomings. By enabling accurate conclusions from patient data, artificial intelligence can assist patients in receiving the high-quality healthcare they desire. Government-led efforts and businesses like MFine are greatly expanding the scope of healthcare and improving healthcare practices.
Customers can access online appointments and healthcare that is linked to hospitals through MFine, an on-demand healthcare firm driven by AI. The MFine app’s telemedicine and teleconsulting features make it considerably easier and more convenient for consumers to get medical information.
On July 11, 2022, MFine united with the diagnostic division of LifeCell International after operating independently for more than five long years. LifeWell will be the name of the united, new organisation.
To learn more about the business, keep reading.
About MFine
Customers can get online appointments and healthcare that is linked to hospitals through the on-demand healthcare firm MFine. Users can use the company’s service to connect with paediatricians, gynaecologists, obstetricians, and doctors from top hospitals of their choice through chat or video to obtain prescriptions and/or normal treatment.
The specialists can evaluate patients using a proprietary Assistive Intelligence platform that the doctors can access. This platform analyses symptoms and delivers accurate predictions. This suggests that, even before the patient visits, the doctor is informed of their condition, enabling a faster and more precise diagnosis.
MFine wants to make getting trustworthy medical care easy, quick, and preventative. With a blend of cutting-edge technologies and partnerships with the best medical facilities, MFine was developed with the customer experience.
With the best physicians working in the top hospitals, MFine offers quick and continuous communication. Modern technology is used to monitor your health indicators and to keep all of your health data in your control and easily accessible. Using digital wearables, smartphone apps, and at-home services can quickly and easily get you the required therapy. Furthermore, in cooperation with the hospitals, MFine offers affordable health checkup packages.
Industry
The health market in India is expected to grow at a CAGR of 39% between FY2020 and FY2023, totalling 50 billion USD by 2033, according to research.
Currently worth over $2 billion, the health-tech sector is broken into six categories: telemedicine, e-pharmacy, fitness, wellness, healthcare IT, analytics, home healthcare, and personal health management. This is less than 1 per cent of India’s entire healthcare market.
The estimations predict that the Indian health-tech market will grow to $5 billion in 2023 and $50 billion in ten years. E-pharmacies, which generated $700 million in sales in 2020, were the most lucrative sector of the Indian health-tech market, followed by B2B health-tech, B2B medical supplies, other health-tech services, e-diagnostics, and teleconsultation.
The future of healthcare will be greatly impacted by technology like wearables, on-body devices, robots, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and machine learning, among others. It is predicted that the use of cloud infrastructure for healthcare record management will increase, along with the emphasis on digitising patient medical records.
Founders
The company was founded by Ajit Narayanan, Arjun Choudhary, Ashutosh Lawania, Prasad Kompalli in 2017.
Startup Story
At the end of 2016, former top executives of Myntra Ashutosh Lawania and Prasad Kompalli decided to start over. They’d assisted Myntra in becoming a fantastic consumer brand in e-commerce, but they recognised a similar gap in healthcare. That’s how MFine’s concept first entered their heads.
MFine was established as a healthcare platform in February 2017. Although they had started businesses before, MFine represented a new endeavour. When MFine was just an idea on paper, Kompalli says, “It wasn’t easy convincing people to join us and work with us.”
Hospitals were informed that the customer experience needs to be improved through conversations.
Anyone without a background in medicine or healthcare found it challenging to enter the healthcare industry. According to the developers, it wasn’t easy to attract early adopters. On the other hand, accessibility and easiness are easily adapted by people.
Every day, the company accepts 100–120 cases from various specialities. The company offers voice, video, and chat support and has partnered with 20 hospitals in Bengaluru. It also has 70 doctors who specialise in ten different fields. The founders of the company are currently concentrating on the management of chronic illnesses and the use of IoT to connect medical equipment.
Vision and Mission Statement
The company’s mission statement is to make quality healthcare available to consumers at scale.
The company’s mission has always been to improve everyone’s access to outstanding health by making it trustworthy, simple, and affordable. This vision is fueled by a passion for providing care, propelled by an unwavering focus on quality and directed by cutting-edge artificial intelligence.
Business Model and Revenue Model
Instead of gathering individual doctors on its platform, MFine employs a novel strategy of collaborating with well-known and reliable institutions. Because of its hospital ties, MFine can deliver reputable medical care via a digital channel.
The top specialities on the app are gynaecology, dermatology, paediatrics, cardiology, and general medicine. The company’s primary sources of income include commissions from customer consultations, lead-generation fees from hospitals, and corporate partnerships. It collaborates with nearby hospitals to offer reliable and easily accessible medical care.
As a digital extension of its healthcare partners, MFine generates revenue. In other words, it subtracts a portion of consumer spending. The company emphasises technology and claims to work with over 500 doctors from 100 “elite” universities.
Funding and Investors
Throughout its seven investment rounds, MFine has so far raised more than $94 million. The Series C round, which included contributions totalling $46.39 million from Moore and BEENEXT and was the last capital round for MFine, came in on August 31, 2021. After the previous funding round, the company was given a valuation of between $450 and $500 million.
Growth
The on-demand healthcare platform from MFine enables customers to access linked care programmes and virtual consultations from a network of institutions. Ashutosh Lawania and Prasad Kompalli, former Myntra executives, started it in 2017. Ajit Narayanan and Arjun Choudhary later joined them.
Since its launch, more than 3 million people have used MFine services, with over 300,000 transactions every month involving in-patient treatments, diagnostic tests, e-pharmacies, and medical consultations. To give its consumers access to more than 700 diagnostic centres in 400+ locations throughout India, Mfine connected with laboratory and diagnostic services in October 2018 to add a new layer to its virtual doctor consultations. The business has also stated that it has a network of more than 500 hospitals and 3000+ doctors.
Over 100,000 people use MFine each month to arrange diagnostic tests. In more than 700 respected institutions, more than 6000 doctors—including some of India’s best—practice in more than 35 different specialities. Over a thousand facilities across the nation assist millions of individuals. It works with hospitals rather than aggregating doctors, enabling clients to speak with doctors from their preferred hospitals through chat or video and get prescriptions and basic care.
The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and an increase in Indians’ digital health use have contributed to MFine’s 15 per cent month-over-month growth. To facilitate and improve the delivery of high-quality care via telemedicine, MFine is investing significantly in technology.
The company claims to have offered teleconsultation to more than a million people during the Covid-19 in 2020. The company, which provides AI-powered self-assessment, long-term treatment plans for chronic conditions, and membership privileges to individuals and corporations, expanded outside cities to 1,000 villages throughout India to satisfy demand.
MFine Merger
According to news from July 11, 2022, MFine has merged with LifeCell International’s diagnostic division. After months of searching for various merger and acquisition prospects, MFine has finally merged. The result of this merger is a new organisation known as LifeWell.
According to reports about the newly combined company, LifeWell, it will function as a full-stack digital health platform in the diagnostic industry instead of MFine’s pure-play marketplace. OrbiMed contributed $80 million to a new round of funding for the joint venture. According to a joint press release from the firms, the user base of LifeWell has been consolidated and is now projected to be over 6 million members, rising at a pace of 100% year over year. Over the next four years, LifeWell hopes to provide services to more than 50 million people.
This merger marks the third significant consolidation that has taken place in the Indian healthcare/healthtech environment in the last few years. Before Lybrate’s acquisition by Pristyn Care in June, it was already evident that the unicorn Indian business had merged DocsApp and MediBuddy.
MFine Heart Rate Monitoring Feature
By introducing the brand-new heart-rate monitoring capability coupled with its app, MFine presented its most recent invention. On March 3, 2022, MFine released its heart-rate monitoring capability on its app, enabling users to monitor their heart rates without using any additional devices. According to the most recent reports, approximately 700 users of MFine’s tool are monitored daily heart rate monitoring.
MFine Pulse
Early in 2021, MFine created an app-based SPO2 solution that enables users to monitor their oxygen levels without needing additional equipment. Over 250,000 people have used the application since then, and thousands more do so daily. In the upcoming months, MFine will upgrade the device to include blood pressure and heart rate monitoring.
As of April 2021, MFine has made available MFine Pulse, a mobile application that uses just a finger and a flash to measure blood oxygen levels.
The MFine “Pulse” technology is being beta-tested for Android users and will be for iOS users in a few weeks. Although the tool’s clinical studies are still in progress, it appears to be promising, with an accuracy rate of 80 per cent, according to a news release.
In the company’s Android beta launch, thousands of clients are using the tool, producing hundreds of assessments every day that are fed into machine learning techniques, which, according to CTO Ajit Narayanan, will boost the tool’s precision in the coming months.
MFine Financials
Operating revenue for MFine last reached Rs 70 lakhs in FY19, but it increased by 7.3X to Rs 5.12 crore in FY20. During FY20, the company’s total earnings were reported as Rs. 12.23 crore.
However, to achieve this increase in revenue, MFine also had to make a huge financial sacrifice due to the company’s losses, which increased by 2.9X to Rs 99.5 crore in FY20 from Rs 34.4 crore in FY19. In the fiscal year 2020 (FY20), the company’s unrecovered losses were anticipated to total Rs 140.2 crore.
The amount spent by MFine increased dramatically from Rs 34.4 crore in FY19 to Rs 99.5 crore in FY20. During FY20, the Prasad Kompalli-led business needed to spend Rs 21.87 to make only one rupee.
While MFine’s operational earnings grew to Rs 12.9 crore in the same fiscal year, its losses continued to rise, reaching Rs 102.7 crore. The expenses of MFine were registered at Rs 116 crore.
Competitors
MFine’s top competitors include:
- PristynCare
- MediBuddy
- SeamlessMD
- Happytal
- Helium Health
- Doctor Insta
- Ferrum Health
Challenges Faced
The platform has a comprehensive network of hundreds of machine learning techniques and algorithms span vision, hearing, and language processing modalities. This enables the virtual doctor to understand data from many sources and recommend the best course of action to the real doctor.
Additionally, the company is investing significant money in the platform’s AI capabilities.
They are working on computer vision capabilities to scan and automatically digitise diagnostic documents and analyse symptoms and inference capabilities to diagnose based on symptoms, patient history, and other information presented during the consultation. Skills like identifying the sort of sickness from the sound of a cough, among other things, are considered.
MFine Layoffs
There has been an increase in layoffs in Indian businesses. MFine also disclosed its fair share of layoffs, stating that as of May 21, 2022, the company has let go about half of its workers. The BEENEXT-backed company has reduced its employment by 50%.
According to information from trusted sources, a substantial portion of the remaining employees works in the operations, product, and marketing verticals. According to insiders, the most recent layoffs were made to shorten the company’s burn rate and increase its runway. Sources stated that the number of layoffs could reach 70%.
Within two days after the MFine layoffs’ announcement, protests erupted. To demand their entire salary for the month of May 2022 and an early release of their full and final settlement, more than 100 of the company’s employees began assembling outside the MFine Bengaluru headquarters. People further assert that MFine fired the workers because the company couldn’t afford to pay their salaries. Allegedly, the corporation is out of money. Employees claim that because MFine’s pay period runs from January 20 to February 20, they have worked a full month and are thus also entitled to full payment.
Along with the staff, they were anticipating an evaluation and were unaware of the business’s financial situation. The employees have put pressure on the company to expedite the process and credit the full month’s salary for May after the company initially announced that it would pay the employees 20 days’ salary for May and that it would credit the remaining amount, including that of the notice and period, and have their full and final payment settled. The employees are also concerned about their pay and said that out of 3 offices, MFine has already shuttered 2, leaving only one open and perhaps closing it without paying outstanding debts.
Before this, companies like Vedantu, Meesho, Cars24, Unacademy, and others have already let go of a sizeable portion of their personnel because of their shaky financial foundations and concerns about an imminent recession.
Future plans
With this money, MFine plans to triple its investment in mobile engineering, device integration, machine learning and artificial intelligence. In addition, it intends to expand the number of hospitals it operates nationwide and expand recently launched services like prescription delivery, preventative health screenings, and diagnostic testing.
Edited by Prakriti Arora
