New Delhi: MyUpchar, a local language health content app, has raised $5 million in Series A funding from Nexus Venture Partners, Omidyar Network and Shunwei Capital, the company said in a statement on Tuesday.
The company had raised nearly $300,000 in seed funding from Rajan Anandan, managing director at Google India; Alok Mittal, co-founder and chief executive of lending start-up Indifi; Mohit Satyanand, founder of ed-tech venture Teamwork Arts; and Currae Healthtech Fund, founded by Apoorva Patni, son of Patni Computer Systems Co-Founder Ashok Patni in September last year, according to data from Crunchbase.
MyUpchar partners with doctors to offer health content and translates it into 13 Indian languages across disciplines such as Allopathy, Ayurveda and Homeopathy. The Delhi-based start-up plans to utilise the capital to strengthen its voice, video and virtual reality interfaces, and build newer interfaces to offer large-scale remote provision of health services.
“We are excited by myUpchar’s vision to become India’s largest credible and relatable health destination platform and facilitate low-cost healthcare access to cater to the needs of first-time smartphone users through local language content, a population often referred to as the Next Half Billion,” said Siddharth Nautiyal, investment partner at Omidyar Network.
MyUpchar claims to offer access to over 10 million people by offering healthcare and wellness awareness in Hindi on its platform. It aims to serve more than 500 million individuals with information available in different local languages.
“We have a unique opportunity to solve the acute awareness and access problem in the healthcare space. Our focus over the next couple of years is to address this gap via technology and content,” said Rajat Garg, co-founder and chief executive officer , myUpchar.
Mint reported on 16 August that investors are betting on content-startups, and around a dozen content deals amounting to $400 million are expected to close before the end of this year. ShareChat, another content start-up that offers information and interaction in vernacular languages, has found favour with investors.
Launched in 2016 by Rajat Garg and Manuj Garg, myUpchar offers voice search and text to speech technology, helping customers overcome the hurdle of reading or typing content on the phone.
According to Tuck Lye Foh, CEO and founding partner at Shunwei Capital, there is immense opportunity in the vernacular content space in India.