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

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.

• Core product: multi-gene next-generation-sequencing (NGS) panels that report biomarkers such as tumour mutation burden (TMB) and microsatellite instability (MSI), used to guide targeted and immunotherapy decisions.
• Flagship panel: Indiegene, described by the company as an India population-specific cancer gene panel for biomarker testing (company-stated).
• Entry-level test: a 352-gene panel starting at about ₹30,000, per an Inc42 profile (2020).
• Software layer: OncoTwin / OncoTwin Insights, an AI-driven clinical decision-support tool that sits on top of the sequencing data (company-stated).
• Test volume: around 1,500 genomic tests a month as of mid-2026, which the company aims to scale to 8,000–10,000 a month during its expansion (reported, Analytics Insight, June 2026).

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.

• 2019: won a grant of about $70,000 from the Karnataka government’s Elevate programme (reported, Inc42).
• Graduated from the Illumina Accelerator programme and was incubated in Bengaluru’s biotech ecosystem, including the Bangalore Bioinnovation Centre and the IBAB Biotech Park at Electronics City (company and BBC sources).
• By around 2020 the company had generated data from roughly 1,000 cancer patients in India and delivered reports for over 350 patients — small numbers that show how early the commercial stage still was (Inc42, 2020).
• A second legal entity, 4baseCare Onco Solutions Private Limited, was incorporated on 3 September 2020 and is classified at the Registrar of Companies, Bangalore, as the subsidiary of a company incorporated outside India — a restructuring that split the business across two vehicles and complicates any clean read of consolidated 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:

• Series A — ₹50 crore (~$6 million), 12 August 2024: led by Yali Capital (reported, Entrackr).
• Infosys Innovation Fund — ₹8.3 crore (~$1 million), 14 December 2024: minority stake via Series A CCPS (Infosys disclosure).
• Series B first close — ₹90 crore, 27 January 2026: co-led by veteran investors Ashish Kacholia and Lashit Sanghvi, with participation from existing investor Yali Capital (reported, Entrackr and BioSpectrum).
• Series B top-up — ₹38 crore: led by growX Ventures and Infosys, taking the full Series B to ₹128 crore (about $13.3 million) as reported in June 2026 (Analytics Insight).

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.

• Money in: fees per genomic profiling test, billed largely to hospitals and diagnostic partners, with panels ranging from a 352-gene test priced from about ₹30,000 up to broader whole-exome and RNA offerings.
• Costs out: sequencing reagents and consumables, sequencing instruments, bioinformatics and clinical-genomics staff, and the sales effort to sign and service hospital accounts — a cost base that is heavy up front and only improves with volume.
• Where the margin sits: unit economics improve as monthly test volume rises, because fixed lab and platform costs spread across more samples; this is why the jump from ~1,500 to a targeted 8,000–10,000 tests a month matters so much.
• The software bet: OncoTwin is positioned to turn a per-test lab into a recurring platform, and its selection for the MSK iHub programme at Memorial Sloan Kettering is the clearest external validation of that layer to date (company-stated).
• The part people get wrong: the value 4baseCare is really building is the India-specific dataset. Each test both earns a fee and enlarges a proprietary asset that is hard for a new entrant to replicate — but that asset does not show up as revenue.

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.

• Paid-up capital: ₹35.64 lakh for Onco Solutions and ₹1.11 lakh for the Genomics entity (MCA/Tofler).
• The reported FY25 decline for the Onco Solutions entity should be read against the two-entity structure: revenue can shift between the vehicles, so a single-entity drop is not necessarily a business-wide contraction — and the ₹128 crore Series B that closed in mid-2026 points the other way.
• Bottom line on the numbers: strong capital and volume growth, but a revenue base still in the low tens of crore at most, well below the funding raised.

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.

• Channel: hospitals, cancer centres and diagnostic chains rather than direct-to-patient; oncologists are the decision-makers who order the tests.
• Named hospital partners: AIIMS Jammu, Max Healthcare and Shankara Hospital, among a partner base that the company put at 20+ hospitals as far back as 2020 (reported, Analytics Insight and Inc42).
• Geography: laboratories and operations across India, Dubai, Nepal and the Philippines as of mid-2026, with a stated plan to enter 8–10 more countries over the following 12–18 months (reported, June 2026).
• The surprise: for a Bengaluru startup, a meaningful share of the growth narrative is offshore — the Middle East and Southeast Asia — and the entity that houses the lab business is registered as a subsidiary of a foreign parent, an unusual structure that hints at where the company expects its capital and customers to sit.

The risks

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

• Revenue far below capital raised: with roughly ₹185 crore in disclosed funding against a revenue base in the low tens of crore, 4baseCare depends on continued fundraising to fund expansion. If the scale-up from ~1,500 to 8,000–10,000 tests a month is slower than planned, the cash-burn-to-revenue gap becomes the central problem.
• Reimbursement and adoption: comprehensive genomic profiling is still largely out-of-pocket in India and priced from about ₹30,000 per panel. Without broad insurance reimbursement, the addressable market is capped by what patients and hospitals will self-fund, which limits volume growth regardless of clinical value.
• Competition and commoditisation: genomic testing faces well-funded rivals and falling sequencing costs. The defensible asset is the India-specific dataset and the OncoTwin software; if larger diagnostics players or global platforms replicate the offering, per-test pricing pressure follows.
• Structural and disclosure complexity: operating through two entities, one classified as a foreign subsidiary, makes the group’s true financial position hard for outsiders to verify — a governance and transparency risk that also complicates due diligence for future investors.

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).

• Entrackr — 4baseCare Series A ₹50 crore led by Yali Capital (August 2024); Series B first close ₹90 crore led by Ashish Kacholia and Lashit Sanghvi (January 2026)
• BioSpectrum India — 4baseCare raises ₹90 crore Series B to scale AI-powered precision oncology (January 2026)
• Analytics Insight — Infosys-backed 4baseCare raises ₹128 crore in Series B; test volumes and geographies (June 2026)
• Inc42 — 4baseCare looks to bridge the genomics data gap in India’s cancer care; Infosys backs 4baseCare (2020; December 2024)
• Infosys — company statement on Innovation Fund investment of ₹8.3 crore in 4baseCare (December 2024)
• Tracxn — 4baseCare and legal-entity profiles, revenue ranges and funding totals (2026)
• Tofler / ZaubaCorp — 4baseCare Onco Solutions Pvt Ltd (CIN U85100KA2020FTC138091) and 4baseCare Genomics Pvt Ltd (CIN U74999KA2018PTC112818) incorporation, directors and capital (2026)
• Bangalore Bioinnovation Centre — BBC-incubated 4baseCare raises ₹90 crore Series B (2026)

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