Navia Life Care was started in 2016, by Kunal Kishore Dhawan, Gaurav Gupta and Shourjo Banerjee. They are based in New Delhi, India. There are three founders Kunal Kishore Dhawan, Gaurav Gupta and Shourjo Banerjee collaborated on starting Navia Life Care drawing form their personal experiences in healthcare delivery. Kunal has worked for 8 years in the Healthcare and Life sciences industry that made him plan to explore new possibilities in building up something advanced for Indian healthcare industry. He is a self- motivated entrepreneur who always lookout for innovative solutions that can be embedded in the tools developed by Navia Life Care. He was also included in the Healthcare Executive 30 Under 30 2017. Gaurav Gupta leads the business team at Navia, and is passionate about building a quality solution for healthcare industry. Gaurav is an MBA from Indian School of Business, and an engineer from NSIT Delhi, he specializes in Strategy, Business Development and Marketing. We are publishing an interview of Kunal.
Please tell us about the investors (if any)
Our key investors have been Benori Ventures, led by Mr. Ashish Gupta, Co-founder and Ex-COO of Evalueserve, a 3500 people business research company. Other notable investors are Mr. Sorabh Agarwal, a professional with over 15of experience in M&A and financial research. Dr. Rahul Verma, a seasoned Senior Executive with deep experience in developing new business models and forming strategic partnerships for accelerating growth. Mr. Mayank Mamtani, a healthcare focused investment banking professional based in San Francisco.
Tell us about the Product / Solution. Explain how you went about the Product-Market Fit Process.
Navia Life Care has built easy to use AI enabled products for hospitals and doctors which help hospitals and doctors in solving their day-to-day problems. Navia’s flagship product is its Healthcare suite – Navia SMART, which is a Modular, Integrated and Network-enabled product suite helping providers improve clinical and financial outcomes.
Navia “smartifies” the providers by offering them a comprehensive solution that can be plugged in to their existing IT architecture. It is the platform for medical providers to leverage technology to build, maintain and improve relationships with their patients. It is continuously being improved, with greater focus on utilizing data analytics to provide insights and knowledge back to the customers, along with implementing Artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive analytics to make our customers more aware and provide them with greater ease-of-use. As for the customer segments, we are strongly encouraged by the response we have received to our product by hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies.
Case in point, a 75-bedded multi specialty hospital in East Delhi has implemented Navia SMART, they just plugged and played Navia SMART in their IT systems and have become a SMART hospital. They have significantly improved their patient engagement, increased the care quality and improved revenues by using this easy-to-use dashboard for doctors, administration, marketing and front office teams.
For a biotech or a pharmaceutical company, Navia SMART offers a platform to interact with patients and providers by developing AI-enabled automated patient support programs focused on increasing medication compliance, brand loyalty and patient outcomes.
What were your assumptions when you entered the market, learnings that you have? Who in your mind is your ideal customer? Do you have atleast one of them signed up?
We entered the market as a problem solver for hospitals, we went door to door to meet hospital administrators and doctors to understand the problems they were facing, and then built a product for 2 of those customers, at our cost of building it. Our ideal customer is a small hospital or a clinic. We are working with several such customers now and are growing rapidly, we will acquire about 1000 such customer in this year.
How are you pricing the Product? What is the logic behind it? What is the model you are following – Free / Freemium / Premium etc. ? Explain your thought process.
B2B business model focused on clinics, small and medium sized hospitals and pharmaceutical companies. Following a PAAS (platform as a service) monthly subscription model via providers, which is dependent on their size and ability to pay. We have 3 products for 3 different types of customers, Navia SMART for hospitals, Navia QM for smaller clinics and Navia INTERACT for Pharmaceutical and life sciences companies. Usually, our customers renew the licenses every 12 months, we have about 100% renewal rate right now.
How did you get your first customer?
As mentioned above, we went door to door to meet hospital administrators and doctors to understand the problems, this enabled us to work with a couple of them who served as our first customer.
What is the big picture of your startup? Is this Product leading to something bigger? If so, how?
We are envisioning towards moving to a world of personalized, easily accessible healthcare. Which can only happen if our doctors and hospitals start using AI enabled tools in their everyday lives. Our voice assistant, NAVI, helps doctors in creating their prescription within seconds, this will in turn help in digitizing millions of health records, changing the healthcare landscape in the country.
What is the insight that you have about this market, which no one else has? Uniqueness about your Startup.
I think there are two important insights about this market:
:: Doctors and hospitals have understood the importance of digital technology for improving patient care and efficiency of work
:: This market is a highly price sensitive market and products should be easy to use.
What would be your goal to accomplish in the next six months?
In terms of product evolution – we want to evolve our products towards a great user experience and make them easy to integrate with other systems. In terms of customer acquisition we are targeting over 1000 hospitals/ clinics in the next 6 months or so.
What message do you want to convey to fellow entrepreneurs?
Simplicity of the solution and perseverance are the most important 2 things that can help someone. Entrepreneurship is a difficult road, let us be more open about our hardships and sail through it together.
