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Startup Deep Dive : 4baseCare — the cancer-genomics bet where funding dwarfs revenue

4baseCare has pulled in close to ₹185 crore (about $19 million) across its disclosed 2024–2026 rounds, put its cancer-genomics tests inside hospitals such as Max Healthcare and AIIMS Jammu, and won a place for its AI platform in Memorial Sloan Kettering’s iHub programme in New York. Yet the Bengaluru company that carries most of its lab work is, on the registry, classified as the subsidiary of a parent incorporated outside India, and the entity most often cited for its revenue booked only about ₹12 crore in the year to March 2024.

That gap between capital raised and revenue recognised is the whole story of a precision-oncology startup that is still early, still spending to build a network, and still betting that an India-specific genomic dataset will one day be worth far more than the tests it sells today. This is what the filings, funding announcements and founder interviews actually show, with the numbers attached to their periods.

Quick facts

Company 4baseCare (operates via 4baseCare Genomics Pvt Ltd and 4baseCare Onco Solutions Pvt Ltd)
Founded 2018; Genomics entity incorporated 3 May 2018, Onco Solutions entity 3 September 2020 (MCA)
Founder(s) Hitesh Goswami (CEO) and Kshitij Rishi (COO)
Businesses Cancer genomic profiling tests, an India-specific gene panel (Indiegene), and an AI clinical-decision platform (OncoTwin)
Latest FY revenue ~₹12 crore for FY24 for 4baseCare Onco Solutions (Tracxn); Genomics entity under ₹1 crore in FY24 (Tracxn)
Latest FY profit/loss Not reliably disclosed in public aggregators; treated as unverified below
Listed Private
Last valuation Not publicly disclosed by the company or investors
Key shareholders Founders; Yali Capital; Infosys Innovation Fund; Ashish Kacholia; Lashit Sanghvi; growX Ventures

What they do

4baseCare sells comprehensive genomic profiling for cancer. A patient’s tumour DNA and RNA are sequenced, and the company returns a report telling the treating oncologist which mutations are driving that specific cancer and which targeted therapies or clinical trials match. The customer is not the patient directly but the hospital and the oncologist; 4baseCare works through cancer centres, multispecialty hospitals and diagnostic chains across India and, increasingly, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

The origin

The founding insight was that genomic medicine built on Western datasets does not map cleanly onto Indian patients. Cancer mutation frequencies, drug responses and inherited risk profiles differ across populations, and the reference data that powered precision oncology in the United States and Europe under-represented South Asian genomes. 4baseCare’s founders set out to build the missing India-specific layer: sequence Indian tumours, aggregate the clinico-genomic data, and use it to make treatment recommendations that fit local patients.

Hitesh Goswami and Kshitij Rishi have known each other since the start of their careers at Piramal Life Sciences. Goswami is a neurobiologist by training, with a master’s in Neurobiology and Behavior from Sophia College, Mumbai, and roughly two decades in pharma drug discovery and genomics; he had already co-founded a genomics research firm, Bionivid Technology, in 2011. Rishi came from the commercial and operational side, with an MBA from XLRI Jamshedpur and senior roles at Deloitte and GE Healthcare, where he built relationships with clinicians and learned the plumbing of the Indian hospital system. The pairing matters: one founder could read the science, the other could sell it into hospitals. The company was incorporated as 4baseCare Genomics Private Limited in May 2018.

The struggle years

Deep-tech diagnostics is a slow, capital-hungry business, and 4baseCare spent its first years proving the science before it could prove a market. Sequencing hardware, reagents and bioinformatics talent cost money long before test volumes arrive, and Indian oncologists had to be persuaded that a genomic report would change what they prescribed. The early record is one of grants, accelerators and incubators rather than large revenue.

The honest reading of these years: real scientific credibility and hospital relationships, but a revenue base that stayed thin while the company built the dataset it was actually betting on.

The turning point

The shift from grant-funded lab to venture-backed platform came in the second half of 2024, and it was validated by a name that carries weight in Indian technology. On 12 August 2024, 4baseCare closed a Series A of about ₹50 crore (roughly $6 million) led by Yali Capital. Four months later, on 14 December 2024, Infosys disclosed that its Infosys Innovation Fund had taken a minority stake, investing ₹8.3 crore (nearly $1 million) through Series A compulsory convertible preference shares.

The Infosys investment was the turning point less for its size than for its signal. It put a marquee Indian IT company on the cap table of a cancer-genomics startup, and it framed 4baseCare as an AI-and-data story rather than only a testing lab. On the operating side, the numbers on either side of this event tell the arc: from roughly 350 patient reports around 2020 to more than 10,000 cancer patients said to have been impacted across Southeast Asia by the time of the Series A in August 2024 (company-stated), and to about 1,500 tests a month by mid-2026.

The money behind it

4baseCare’s funding is far better documented than its revenue. The disclosed rounds, with periods and named backers:

Added up, the disclosed Series A and Series B rounds come to roughly ₹185 crore raised across 2024–2026. Startup trackers put the lifetime total higher once earlier angel and seed cheques are counted — Tracxn reports around $25.9 million across nine rounds from 43 investors (reported, unverified against filings). No post-money valuation has been disclosed by the company or its investors, so any valuation figure circulating should be treated as an estimate. Early scientific credibility also came from backers such as geneticist George Church of Harvard Medical School, cited in the company’s early investor list.

How it makes money

The business model is a hybrid of a diagnostics lab and a data-and-software platform. Money comes in per test today, but the long-term wager is on the accumulated clinico-genomic dataset and the AI built on it.

The numbers

This is the section where honesty matters most. 4baseCare runs through two legal entities, and public aggregators disagree and paywall much of the detail, so a clean audited multi-year revenue-and-profit series is not reliably available. The figures below are what can be defended, each labelled with its entity, period and source. Profit and loss figures are not disclosed reliably enough to publish, and detailed aggregator numbers that implied near-100% net margins were discarded as inconsistent.

Entity / period Revenue (₹ crore) Source
4baseCare Onco Solutions — FY24 (to Mar 2024) ~12 (about 21% growth) Tracxn
4baseCare Onco Solutions — FY25 (to Mar 2025) Reported sharply lower (aggregator flagged a large YoY decline) Tofler (single-entity, treat with caution)
4baseCare Genomics — FY24 (to Mar 2024) Under 1 Tracxn
4baseCare Genomics — FY25 (to Mar 2025) Under 10 Tracxn

Where the money comes from

Revenue is concentrated in genomic testing sold through hospital and oncologist channels, spread across a widening geographic footprint. The mix is more about geography and channel than about distinct product lines today.

The risks

The risks here are concrete and mostly structural, not cosmetic.

The takeaway

4baseCare is a clean example of a deep-tech pattern that Indian investors are still learning to price: a company whose real product is a dataset, sold today as a stream of tests. The tests generate modest revenue; the data and the AI trained on it are the asset the funding is buying. That can be a genuinely valuable position — an India-specific clinico-genomic corpus is hard to copy — but it only pays off if test volume climbs fast enough to build the dataset and reach lab-level profitability before the capital runs out. The transferable lesson is to separate the two questions investors and operators tend to blur: what a company earns now, and what it is quietly accumulating. For 4baseCare those two numbers are very far apart, and the whole bet rides on closing that gap.

Frequently asked questions

What does 4baseCare do?

It provides comprehensive genomic profiling for cancer. It sequences a patient’s tumour and returns a report to the oncologist identifying the mutations driving the cancer and the targeted therapies or trials that match, sold mainly through hospitals and diagnostic chains.

Who founded 4baseCare and when?

It was founded in 2018 by Hitesh Goswami (CEO) and Kshitij Rishi (COO), who first worked together at Piramal Life Sciences. Goswami is a genomics and drug-discovery scientist who earlier co-founded Bionivid Technology; Rishi came from Deloitte and GE Healthcare.

How much has 4baseCare raised?

Roughly ₹185 crore across its disclosed Series A (₹50 crore, August 2024, led by Yali Capital) and Series B (₹128 crore, closed mid-2026, co-led by Ashish Kacholia and Lashit Sanghvi with growX Ventures and Infosys). Startup trackers put the lifetime total higher once earlier rounds are included.

Is 4baseCare profitable?

There is no reliable public disclosure of its profit or loss. Revenue for the main operating entity was around ₹12 crore in FY24 (per Tracxn), well below the capital it has raised, so the business is still in an investment phase rather than steady-state profitability.

Where does 4baseCare operate?

It is headquartered in Bengaluru and, as of mid-2026, runs labs and operations across India, Dubai, Nepal and the Philippines, with named hospital partners including AIIMS Jammu, Max Healthcare and Shankara Hospital and plans to enter more countries.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

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