Bengaluru: India has immense potential to build companies that provide artificial intelligence (AI) services in healthcare to improve convenience, accessibility, and affordability around the world, a top executive at early-stage venture capital firm W Health Ventures told Mint.
“The biggest asset India will contribute to the world in healthcare is actually the AI-enabled services that will help make healthcare more convenient and less expensive. This is a space we are very excited about,” said Pankaj Jethwani, managing partner at W Health Ventures.
W Health has raised its second fund of $70 million to invest in single-specialty care delivery and AI-enabled healthcare services for enterprises. With this fund, W Health aims to build 8 to 10 new companies over the next four years. The first goal is single-specialty care delivery platforms that fill critical clinical ‘white spaces’ in India, Jethwani said.
Shot in the arm
W Health’s second fund, which Mint reported about last week, is a positive development for early-stage deals as funding softened to $3 billion in 2024 from $4 billion in the previous year, according to estimates by Tracxn.
The firm will also make Series B investments “selectively”, with an emphasis on healthcare businesses that are being built for both domestic and global markets. “The upcoming fund will continue our focus on early-stage healthcare innovation. We will also selectively back Series A and B companies that align with our thesis,” Jethwani had told Mint earlier.
“There’s so much investment being poured into AI and SaaS companies across the world right now, but the legacy health system of our company is really challenged with the right staffing or AI talent internally,” Jethwani added. “No machine learning engineer’s dream job is to work in a hospital. They all want to go work for innovative startups or large technology companies. There is a gap within large legacy enterprises in healthcare in terms of creating a modern data infrastructure and building your own AI solutions. That’s what we should be solving.”
W Health has already begun deploying capital from its second fund, with its first investment in cancer care firm EverHope Oncology. Everhope has also secured a $10 million investment led by Narayana Health.
Resignation
Namit Chugh, a principal at the firm, has resigned from the post and is currently serving his notice, Mint reported last week. Chugh served in the role for a little over four years and is counted among the early members of W Health. Before joining W Health Ventures he worked as an associate at Lok Capital (backer of Akshayakalpa Organics and Mintifi), where he made investments across sectors. He has also worked with consulting firms such as Alvarez & Marsal and PwC and focused on strategy and commercial due diligence assignments for private-equity clients.
