MFine Success and Merger Story - Digitizing The Healthcare Sector

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The focus of healthcare has been shifting toward the patient for quite some time now. The expansion of the health-tech industry is being driven by the availability of inexpensive healthcare paired with sustainable mobility. The medical technology business is growing due to changing terrain, improved healthcare delivery and funding methods, and a changing patient profile.

Even with all its flaws, India's healthcare system has a lot moving for it on several fronts. Artificial intelligence can make accurate conclusions possible when it comes to patients' data, thereby helping the patients achieve the healthcare quality they dream of. The government-led campaigns along with the companies like MFine are making the reach of healthcare broader and refining the healthcare practices to a huge extent.

MFine is an AI-powered, on-demand healthcare startup that gives customers access to online appointments and hospital-based linked healthcare. Telemedicine and teleconsulting programs via the MFine app are allowing medical knowledge to reach people much more easily and conveniently.

MFine merged with LifeCell International's diagnostic arm on July 11, 2022, after being an independent company for over 5 long years. The new, merged entity will emerge as LifeWell.

Here's learning "What is MFine?", MFine owner name, Founders of MFine, MFine Funding, MFine Competitors in India, MFine merger, and everything else about the MFine company. Follow below to get an insight into the company:

MFine - Company Highlights

About MFine
MFine - Industry
MFine - Name, Logo, and Tagline
MFine - Founders
MFine - Startup Story
MFine - Vision and Mission Statement
MFine - Business Model and Revenue Model
MFine - Funding, and Investors
MFine - Growth and Revenue
MFine - Competitors
MFine - Challenges Faced
MFine - Future Plans

About MFine

MFine is an AI-powered on-demand healthcare startup that gives customers access to online appointments and hospital-based linked healthcare. Users can contact paediatricians, gynaecologists, obstetricians, and physicians from leading hospitals of their choice through chat or video to acquire prescriptions and/or routine treatment using the company's service.

The doctors have exposure to a proprietary Assistive Intelligence platform that analyses symptoms and provides an accurate prediction for specialists to evaluate patients. This implies that now the doctor is aware of the patient's condition even before they visit them, allowing for a quicker and more accurate diagnosis.

MFine aspires to make obtaining reliable healthcare simple, quick, and preventative. MFine was created by keeping the customer experience in mind, using a combination of cutting-edge technologies and collaborations with the finest medical centres.

MFine enables rapid and ongoing communication with the greatest doctors in the best hospitals. It makes use of cutting-edge technology to keep track of your health indicators and to keep all of your health data under your control and accessible. Digital wearables, smartphone apps, and at-home services provide much-needed ease and speed in bringing you the treatment you need when you need it. Furthermore, MFine also provides discounted health check packages in partnership with the hospitals.

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MFine - Industry

According to research, India’s health market is predicted to develop at 39% at CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) from FY2020 to FY2023, reaching 50 billion USD by 2033.

The health-tech market is presently valued at over $2 billion, and it is divided into six segments: telemedicine, e-pharmacy, fitness, wellness, healthcare IT, analytics, home healthcare, and personal health management. This represents less than 1% of India's total healthcare business.

"The pandemic and adoption of technology in healthcare have brought a quantum shift in the sector. In recent years, we have seen some of the most significant deals, and the Indian health-tech sector has received close to $1.6 billion in funding since 2017," said Rajeev Shah, MD, and CEO of RBSA Advisors.

According to the estimates, the Indian health-tech industry would reach $5 billion in 2023 and $50 billion in 10 years. With $700 million in revenue in 2020, e-pharmacies were the most profitable segment of the Indian health-tech market, followed by B2B health-tech ($60.2 million), B2B medical supplies ($28.8 million), other health-tech services ($100 million), e-diagnostics ($70 million), and teleconsultation ($45 million).

Machine learning, robotics, artificial intelligence, wearables, on-body gadgets, and blockchain, among other technologies, will have a significant impact on the future of healthcare. The use of cloud infrastructure in healthcare record management, as well as a greater focus on the digitalization of patient medical records, is expected to accelerate.

MFine - Name, Logo, and Tagline

MFine, as the name implies, shows what the firm does for its consumers, i.e., the patients. The mfine company makes it easy or patients to check up with physicians online and receive health tests at home, all with touch or the click of a button, thereby ensuring that they are fine.

MFine's slogan says, "MFine - one app for all your health needs."

MFine - Founders

MFine was founded by Ajit Narayanan, Arjun Choudhary, Ashutosh Lawania, Prasad Kompalli in 2017.

Ajit Narayanan

Ajit is an electronics engineer with over 2 decades of experience in product development and organization building in e-commerce, consumer internet, mobile, healthcare, analytics, and integration platforms.

As a Co-founder, CTO, and Product Office of MFine, Ajit is in charge of the company's product and technology strategy. Ajit was the CTO of Myntra, India's largest e-commerce shop for fashion and leisure items, in a prior life. Ajit began his career in mobile technology at SAP, where he developed solutions for offline and online mobile application development, as well as domain programming languages for User Interfaces and API administration.

Arjun Choudhary

Arjun Choudhary, an IIT Roorkee alumni with over 10 years of expertise in sales, revenue, and growth, is in charge of the company's Strategic Business Expansion. Before joining MFine, he worked at Myntra as a Senior Director of Growth and Sales, where he helped the company grow by 50 times. He's also worked as a global capacity planning analyst for Amazon. Arjun is currently serving as the Chief Business Officer at MFine, along with being a Founding Member of the company.

Ashutosh Lawania

Ashutosh Lawania is a software application developer and digital marketer with over 15 years of expertise. Ashutosh is known as one of the co-founders of the healthcare app MFine. He has also been the Co-founder and Head of Sales and Marketing at Myntra, an Indian e-commerce website where men and women can buy branded footwear, clothes, and accessories.

Before joining Myntra, Lawania co-founded Bytedge Solutions, a product engineering firm that specializes in assisting product development firms and startups with their product engineering and go-to-market processes. Lawania graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur with a Bachelor's degree.

Prasad Kompalli

Prasad Kompalli, the former CBO of Myntra and Senior VP of SAP Labs, believes in harnessing technology for innovation, and his area of expertise is business strategy. He was a member of SAP's top 200 worldwide executives, holding positions in Strategy and General Management. He completed his Postgraduate studies in Business Management at the European School of Management and Technologies (Berlin), IMD Switzerland, and INSEAD France, and he possesses 7 patents in data and mobile technology. Kompalli is known as the CEO and Co-founder of MFine.

MFine was last registered with a total count of employees ranging between 501-1000, on its Linkedin profile.  

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MFine - Startup Story

Ashutosh Lawania and Prasad Kompalli, both former top executives of Myntra, chose to start from scratch at the end of 2016. They'd helped Myntra grow into a great e-commerce consumer brand, but they noticed something similar was missing in healthcare. That was how MFine's idea came to their mind.

MFine was founded in February 2017 as a healthcare platform. While they were not strangers to founding a business, MFine was a new experience for them. "It wasn't easy persuading folks to join us and work with us when MFine was simply a notion on paper," explains Kompalli.

Conversations with hospitals revealed that the customer experience needed to be improved.

"They needed an easy interface with limited typing, so we came up with a health keypad which collects data from reports without the user having to type. We ran a beta program and the results were promising,” Kompalli say

It was difficult for anyone without a medical or healthcare background to break into the healthcare ecosystem. Catching the early adopters, according to the creators, was challenging. People, on the other hand, quickly adapt to accessibility and ease.

The business accepts 100-120 cases every day from a variety of specialities. The business has collaborated with 20 hospitals in Bengaluru and has 70 doctors across ten specialities, offering voice, video, and chat support. The company's founders are currently focusing on chronic illness management and the use of IoT to link medical equipment.

MFine - Vision and Mission Statement

MFine's mission statement is to make quality healthcare available to consumers at scale.

MFine's vision has always been to make excellent health more accessible, dependable, and hassle-free for everyone, driven by a love for providing care, spurred by an uncompromising emphasis on quality, and guided by ground-breaking artificial intelligence.

MFine - Business Model and Revenue Model

Instead of collecting individual physicians on its platform, MFine uses a unique methodology of working with prominent and trustworthy institutions. MFine can provide high-quality treatment from trustworthy doctors via a digital channel because of its hospital affiliations.

Gynaecology, dermatology, paediatrics, cardiology, and general medicine are among the app's most popular specialities. Commissions from client consultations, lead-generation fees from hospitals, and corporate tie-ups are the main sources of revenue for the firm. It also has partnerships with local hospitals to provide accessible and dependable medical treatment.

MFine earns money by acting as a digital extension of its healthcare partners. That is, it deducts a portion of consumer expenditure. The firm claims to deal with over 500 doctors from 100 "elite" institutions, with a strong emphasis on technology.

MFine - Funding, and Investors

MFine, to date, has obtained $94+ mn over the 7 funding rounds that it has received funding in. The last funding round of MFine was the Series C round that came in on August 31, 2021, which was led by BEENEXT and Moore that poured in $46.39 mn. The company has been valued between $450-500 mn after the completion of the last funding round.

MFine has raised 7 rounds of funding. Check them out below:

MFine - Growth

MFine's on-demand healthcare platform allows users to obtain virtual consultations and linked care programs from a network of hospitals. It was founded in 2017 by former Myntra executives Ashutosh Lawania and Prasad Kompalli, who were subsequently joined by Ajit Narayanan and Arjun Choudhary.

Over 3 million customers have used MFine services since its debut, with over 300,000 monthly transactions including medical consultations, diagnostic testing, e-pharmacy, and in-patient treatments. Mfine introduced a new layer to its virtual doctor consultations in October 2018 by connecting with laboratory and diagnostic services, giving its customers access to more than 700 diagnostic centres in 400+ locations throughout India. The company further has claimed to have a network of over 500 hospitals with 3000+ doctors.

Every month, over 100,000 people utilize MFine to schedule diagnostic testing. More than 6000 physicians, including some of India's best, spanning 35+ specialities, work in over 700 reputable institutions. They assist millions of people in over 1000 locations around the country. Instead of aggregating doctors, it works with hospitals, allowing customers to consult doctors from their favourite hospitals through chat or video and receive prescriptions and basic care.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and a rise in the uptake of digital health among Indians, MFine has grown 15% month on month. MFine is substantially investing in technology to make the telemedicine experience much easier and more effective for providing high-quality treatment.

During the Covid-19 in 2020, the firm claims to have provided teleconsultation for over a million people. To meet demand, the firm extended beyond cities to 1,000 villages throughout India, offering AI-powered self-assessment, long-term care programs for chronic diseases, and membership perks to both individuals and businesses.

MFine Merger

MFine has merged with the diagnostic business of LifeCell International, as per the July 11, 2022, reports. After looking for numerous merger and acquisition opportunities for the past months, MFine has ultimately successfully merged. This merger has brought forth a new entity that will be termed as LifeWell.

As per the reports associated with the new, merged entity, LifeWell, it will stand as a full-stack digital health platform in the diagnostic space in contrast to the pure-play marketplace that MFine was. Besides, the joint entity has also raised $80 mn in a new round from OrbiMed. The total userbase of LifeWell has been combined to be estimated at over 6 mn users, which is growing at a rate of 100% Y-o-Y, revealed the companies in a joint press release. LifeWell is looking to serve more than 50 million users over the next 4 years.

This merger is the third major consolidation that the Indian healthcare/healthtech ecosystem has seen during the past couple of years. It was already seen that the unicorn Indian startup, Pristyn Care acquired Lybrate in a distress sale in June, and prior to that, we saw the merger of DocsApp and MediBuddy.    

MFine Heart Rate Monitoring Feature

MFine unveiled its latest innovation by presenting the all-new heart-rate monitoring feature integrated with its app. MFine launched its heart-rate monitoring tool on its app on March 3, 2022, which is designed to help people keep a track of their heart rate without any external devices. As far as the latest news goes, nearly 700 people are using this tool of MFine to monitor their heart rate every day.

MFine Pulse

MFine developed an app-based SPO2 solution in early 2021, allowing users to monitor their oxygen levels without the requirement of separate equipment. Since then, the program has been utilized by over 250,000 people, with thousands more using it regularly. MFine will be adding heart rate and blood pressure monitoring to the product in the coming months.

As of April 2021, MFine has released MFine Pulse, a mobile application that can check blood oxygen levels with just a finger and a flash.

The technology, named MFine 'Pulse,' is now in beta testing for Android users and will be for iOS in a few weeks. Even though clinical studies for the tool are still ongoing, the tool looks to be promising, with an accuracy rate of 80%, according to a news release.

Thousands of customers are using the tool in the company's Android beta rollout, generating hundreds of assessments every day that are put into machine learning techniques, which CTO Ajit Narayanan believes will increase the tool's precision in the months ahead.

"For now, the goal is to make our SpO2 monitoring tool as accurate, if not more accurate, than pulse oximeters available at the pharmacy," Narayanan said.

MFine Financials

MFine had last recorded Rs 70 lakhs in operating revenue in FY19, which surged by 7.3X to become Rs 5.12 crore in FY20. The total earnings of the company have been recorded at Rs 12.23 crore during FY20.

However, for the surge in its revenue, MFine also had to sacrifice a considerable amount of money because the losses of the company ballooned by 2.9X to become Rs 99.5 crore in FY20 from Rs 34.4 crore in FY19. The outstanding losses of the company were estimated in the FY20 fiscal to be Rs 140.2 crore.

MFine expenditures surged rapidly from Rs 34.4 crore that it spent in FY19 to become Rs 99.5 crore in FY20. The Prasad Kompalli-led company spent Rs 21.87 to earn a single rupee during FY20.

The losses for MFine further increased to Rs 102.7 cr in FY21, while its operational earnings went on to become Rs 12.9 crore during the same fiscal. The expenses of MFine were registered at Rs 116 crore.

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MFine - Competitors

MFine's top competitors include:

• PristynCare
• MediBuddy
• SeamlessMD
• Happytal
• Helium Health
• Doctor Insta
• Ferrum Health

MFine - Challenges Faced

The platform includes a sophisticated web of hundreds of machine learning algorithms and techniques across vision, hearing, and language processing modalities, allowing the virtual doctor to interpret data from numerous sources and propose the best next actions to the doctor.

According to Kompalli, the current problem is scaling innovation now that the prior hurdle of convincing people to switch to digital healthcare has passed. "We're now facing innovative hurdles, such as how quickly we can scale up the ideas we made in the mobile and AI sector."

In addition, the corporation is putting a lot of money into the platform's AI capabilities.

They are working on inference capabilities to diagnose based on symptoms, patient history, and other data provided during the consultation, as well as computer vision capabilities to scan and automatically digitize diagnostic papers and interpret symptoms. Skills are being considered, such as determining the type of infection based on the sound of a cough, among other things.

MFine Layoffs

The Indian companies are seeing a spike in layoffs. MFine too announced its share of employee layoffs, where the company has laid off around 50% of its workforce, as of May 21, 2022. The BEENEXT-backed company has done away with 50% of its total workforce, and as per reports from close sources, a considerable chunk of the employee belongs to the operations, product, and marketing verticals.  The latest layoffs were done, as per the sources, to reduce burn and extend the runway for the company. Source also claimed that the layoffs can go up as high as 70%.

Protests began within 2 days of the announcement of the MFine layoffs. Over 100 of the company's employees started gathering outside the MFine Bengaluru office, demanding their full salaries for the month of May 2022, and an early release of their full and final settlement. People also claim that MFine has laid off the employees due to its inability to pay their salaries. The company has allegedly run out of funds. According to the employees, the pay cycle of MFine is from 20th to 20th, and they have served a full month that way and should be paid in full too. They were expecting an appraisal, added the employees, and had no idea about the company's financial condition. The company, which had earlier announced to pay the employees 20 days' salary for the month of May and said that it would credit the rest amount including that of the notice and period, and have their full and final payment settled, has now been pressurised by the employees to make the whole procedure fast and to credit the full month's salary of May. The employees are also apprehensive about their salaries and mentioned that out of 3 offices, MFine has already closed 2, where only 1 office is currently operational, which might also be closed without clearing their dues.  

Previously, Vedantu, Meesho, Cars24, Unacademy, and more have already laid off a considerable amount of their workforce due to the unstable financial grounds that they are standing on, and the fear of an impending recession.

MFine - Future Plans

MFine intends to treble its investment in Machine learning and artificial intelligence, mobile engineering, and device integration with this cash. Aside from that, it plans to grow its hospital network across the country and scale up newly released services like prescription delivery, preventative health screenings, and diagnostic testing.

FAQs

When was MFine founded and who founded MFine?

MFine was founded by Ashutosh Lawania, Prasad Kompalli, Ajit Narayanan and Arjun Choudhary in February 2017.

How is the MFine funding?

Looking at the MFine funding, the company has raised a funding more than $94 mn to date, as of July 2022.

How does MFine make money?

Commissions from client consultations, lead-generation fees from hospitals, and corporate tie-ups are the main sources of revenue for the firm. It also has partnerships with local hospitals to provide accessible and dependable medical treatment.

What is the use of MFine?

Mfine is an AI-powered on-demand healthcare startup that gives customers access to online appointments and hospital-based linked healthcare.

Which companies do MFine compete with?

Mfine's top competitors include SeamlessMD, Happytal, Helium Health, MediBuddy, Pristyn Care, Doctor Insta, and Ferrum Health.

Has MFine been merged?

Yes, MFine, which was looking for a merger, has finally merged with LifeCell's diagnostic unit to bring about a joint entity LifeWell, as per the reports dated July 11, 2022.