Startup Deep Dive : MedPay — it wired 60,000 clinics for cashless care, then its own revenue stayed thin

MedPay’s Connected Care Network links more than 60,000 standalone clinics, pharmacies and diagnostic labs across over 500 Indian cities directly to insurers, letting a policyholder walk into a neighbourhood chemist and pay nothing at the counter. Yet the Bengaluru startup that built this rail network reported revenue of just ₹10.8 crore ($1.1 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0, 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) for FY25, as per Inc42’s company database — up a sharp 329.4% from FY24’s ₹2.5 crore, but still a fraction of what a 60,000-provider footprint might suggest, while its own headcount has fallen from around 57 people in March 2022 to 22 by August 2026.

That gap between reach and revenue is the story of MedPay: a four-person idea born inside a London-backed founder programme in the first weeks of India’s COVID-19 lockdown, built into the wiring behind India’s first nationwide cashless outpatient insurance product, and still, six years on, a seed-stage company leaning on its third undisclosed funding top-up rather than a marquee Series A. This piece traces what MedPay actually sells, who built it, the two setbacks visible in its own filings, the insurer deal that changed its trajectory, and the numbers — as far as the public record allows them to be verified — behind a business that has always been easier to describe than to price.

Quick facts

What MedPay actually does

MedPay does not sell insurance and does not sell healthcare. It sells the connective tissue between the two. Its Connected Care Network is an API layer that plugs standalone doctors’ clinics, neighbourhood pharmacies and diagnostic labs into insurers’ claims systems, so that a patient with an outpatient (OPD) insurance rider can walk in, get treated, and leave without paying cash — the claim is settled electronically between the provider and the insurer through MedPay’s rails. As of July 2022, the network covered more than 60,000 outpatient centres across over 500 cities, plumbed into roughly 20 healthcare platforms, according to a Business Today report. The buyers on one side are insurers such as ICICI Lombard and Edelweiss General Insurance looking to offer cashless OPD as a differentiated product; on the other are the clinics, pharmacies and labs that get access to insured footfall without having to build any of the payment or claims infrastructure themselves.

The origin

MedPay was incorporated as Medway Technologies Private Limited on 4 April 2020 (CIN U72900KA2020PTC133661), according to company records reviewed on Tofler and Tracxn — which places the founding squarely inside India’s first, most severe COVID-19 lockdown. Ravi Chandra Merugu and Arun Bhatia built the company through Entrepreneur First, the London-headquartered “company builder” that recruits individual technologists and engineers before they have a start-up idea, backs them through a structured programme, and takes an early equity stake in whatever they eventually build — which is why EF shows up as MedPay’s earliest and most consistent investor across every round Tracxn has on record. The founding insight was simple and, at the time, strikingly badly timed: India’s outpatient care market — the doctor visits, diagnostic tests and pharmacy bills that make up the bulk of a household’s actual healthcare spending — ran almost entirely on cash, while health insurers had spent years building cashless infrastructure only for hospital admissions. Chandra later summed up the pitch to BioSpectrum India as unlocking “the value of OPD for all the stakeholders using technology” — betting that if hospitalisation could be cashless, so could a pharmacy bill, provided someone built the wiring to connect fragmented, unbranded local providers to insurers who had never had to deal with them directly.

The struggle years

The first strain was timing. MedPay set out to digitise footfall-dependent outpatient care in the exact weeks India’s clinics, labs and pharmacies were operating under lockdown restrictions and patients were avoiding in-person visits altogether — the opposite of ideal conditions for a network business that only earns when a patient physically shows up at a partner clinic and gets treated. The company’s own numbers, four years later, hint at how uneven the climb has been since. Its FY23 filings, as analysed by Tofler from Ministry of Corporate Affairs records, show net worth falling 89.2% year-on-year and borrowings rising more than tenfold (up 1,066%), alongside an 81.6% jump in total assets — the profile of a company drawing hard on debt and outside capital to stay funded rather than growing off its own balance sheet. The second strain shows up in headcount. BioSpectrum India put MedPay’s team at 57 people in a report dated 11 March 2022; by August 2026, per Inc42 and Tracxn, that number stood at 22 — a reduction of more than half over four and a half years, even as the company’s revenue base and network claims grew. And despite building out marquee insurer partnerships early, MedPay has not announced a Series A: its most recent disclosed capital event, in May 2024, was another seed round rather than a step up in round size, per Inc42’s funding database.

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after in MedPay’s public record centres on 6 December 2021, when ICICI Lombard General Insurance announced a partnership with MedWay Technologies to offer cashless OPD to its policyholders nationwide — a deal Elets BFSI reported made ICICI Lombard the first insurer in India to extend cashless claims processing to outpatient care across the country, not just hospital admissions. Before that date, MedPay’s own reported numbers were modest: by July 2021 its network spanned 50,000-plus health centres across 450 cities and 4,000-plus pin codes, and it had processed just over ₹14 crore in cumulative OPD transaction volume in its first year, according to IndiaMedToday — with a healthtech platform, MFine, as one of its few named distribution partners. After the ICICI Lombard deal, growth in the network figures MedPay was willing to disclose accelerated: by March 2022, BioSpectrum India reported 57,000-plus centres across 500-plus cities; by July 2022, Business Today put the number at 60,000-plus centres across the same 500-plus cities, spread over roughly 20 healthcare platforms, with Edelweiss General Insurance signed as a second insurer and Go Digit and Acko named as prospects in active talks. ICICI Lombard’s chief of underwriting, Sanjay Datta, framed the problem the deal was meant to solve bluntly: “Consumers often bear extreme financial burden paying out of pocket and waiting for reimbursements,” he told Elets BFSI, calling the OPD product a fix for “a critical gap in the customer’s experience journey.”

The money behind it

MedPay’s capital history is a study in staying at seed stage for a long time rather than a rapid step-up through round sizes. Tracxn and Inc42, the two aggregators with round-level detail, disagree on some specifics — a reminder that neither has confirmed figures directly from the company — but the broad shape is consistent across both:

• Seed round one: reported at roughly $646,000, dated by Tracxn to July 2020, led by Entrepreneur First — the earliest capital behind the idea, arriving within months of incorporation.
• Seed round two: $1.2 million, announced 15 July 2021, led by Entrepreneur First with participation from GrowX Ventures — confirmed independently by IndiaMedToday and Startup Story Media, both dated the same week. Entrepreneur First’s India representative, Venkat Raju, called MedPay “a truly disruptive InsureTech / HealthTech startup” at the time, drawing a comparison to fintech businesses built on India’s UPI and India Stack rails.
• Seed round three: dated 31 May 2024 by Inc42’s funding database, with Turbostart named as the investor and the amount undisclosed — MedPay’s most recent disclosed capital event, and still a seed round rather than a Series A almost four years after founding.
• Total disclosed funding across the first two rounds: about $1.85 million, per Tracxn — before adding whatever the undisclosed 2024 round contributed.
• Valuation: contested. Inc42 pegs the post-money valuation after the July 2021 round at about $4.56 million; Tracxn estimates it at about $8.14 million for the same round and about $9.38 million after the 2020 round — a wide, unreconciled gap between the two trackers, and no figure the company itself has confirmed publicly.
• BioSpectrum India separately reported, as of 11 March 2022, total funds raised of ₹9.16 crore (roughly $1.2 million at then-prevailing rates) and cumulative revenue since inception of ₹4.6 crore — both company-stated figures at that date rather than independently audited numbers.

How it makes money

MedPay runs a business-to-business, platform-as-a-service model: it is infrastructure that neither the insurer nor the patient sees directly, sitting between the two and taking a cut of a cashless OPD transaction for making the claim settle instantly rather than through paper reimbursement weeks later. Money comes in from two directions at once:

• Insurers pay to plug into a ready-made network of 60,000-plus outpatient providers rather than building direct integrations with thousands of small, unbranded clinics and pharmacies themselves.
• Healthcare platforms — MedPay named MFine as a partner as of mid-2021 — use the CCN for hyperlocal fulfilment of their own patients’ OPD needs, per IndiaMedToday.

The exact per-transaction fee MedPay charges has not been publicly disclosed in any of the filings or press coverage reviewed for this piece, so it cannot be stated as a number here. What is publicly clear is the part people tend to get wrong: MedPay is not a health app or an insurer-facing brand a patient would recognise — Business Today’s July 2022 reporting noted that more than 65% of orders on the network originate from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, where the value MedPay adds is less about a slick consumer interface and more about simply existing as digital rails in places India’s insurers had no direct presence at all.

The numbers

MedPay is a private, seed-stage company, and its full profit-and-loss history is not publicly available — most of what MCA filings would show beyond top-line revenue ranges sits behind paid corporate-database subscriptions (Tofler, Tracxn Pro) that this research did not access. The table below shows only what could be verified from sources actually opened this session; gaps are left as gaps rather than filled in.

The FY24-to-FY25 jump is real and comes from Inc42’s company database, and its direction — sharp growth off a small base — is corroborated by Tracxn, which separately puts FY25 revenue in a ₹10-50 crore range and calculates a similar compounded growth rate of about 329% over the year. But a single strong growth year following a period in which the company’s own balance sheet (FY23) shows net worth collapsing and borrowings spiking more than tenfold is not, on its own, evidence of a business that has found stable unit economics — only evidence that FY25 was a better year than FY23 and FY24.

Where the money comes from

• Geography: more than 65% of orders on the network originate from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, as of Business Today’s July 2022 reporting — the surprise being that MedPay’s real usage is concentrated away from India’s metro healthtech battlegrounds, in smaller cities where insurers historically had the weakest direct provider networks.
• Insurer channel: ICICI Lombard (nationwide cashless OPD, from December 2021) and Edelweiss General Insurance (signed by mid-2022) are the two confirmed insurer partners; Go Digit and Acko were reported as being in active talks as of July 2022, with no confirmed announcement found since.
• Platform channel: healthtech platform MFine used MedPay’s CCN for hyperlocal fulfilment of patient orders, as reported by IndiaMedToday in July 2021 — a business-to-business-to-consumer route alongside the direct insurer channel.
• Provider mix: the CCN spans three provider types in one network — standalone clinics, neighbourhood pharmacies and diagnostic labs — rather than specialising in just one, which is what lets it offer insurers a single integration for the whole outpatient journey.

The risks

• Revenue has not tracked network size. A footprint of 60,000-plus providers across 500-plus cities (last publicly updated in mid-2022) sits next to FY24 revenue of just ₹2.5 crore, per Inc42 — a gap that suggests actual claims volume flowing through the network may be far thinner than the headline provider count implies, and that growing the network further may not translate proportionally into revenue without deeper insurer or provider monetisation.
• Balance-sheet fragility shows up in the company’s own filings. Tofler’s analysis of MCA data shows MedPay’s net worth falling 89.2% and borrowings rising more than tenfold in FY23 — a combination that typically signals a company leaning on debt to bridge a period when equity funding or revenue was not covering costs, and one it has not visibly repeated a matching equity round to fix, since its next disclosed raise (May 2024) was another seed round with an undisclosed size.
• The business depends on insurers choosing to keep offering an optional product. Cashless OPD is an add-on rider that insurers choose to build and price, not a mandated cover; MedPay’s addressable market moves with how many insurers such as ICICI Lombard and Edelweiss decide to keep investing in OPD products, and with how India’s insurance regulator treats this category going forward, rather than with any commitment MedPay itself can make on its own.

The takeaway

MedPay’s six years are a useful correction to a common assumption in infrastructure start-ups: that reach is the same thing as revenue. Wiring 60,000 clinics, pharmacies and labs into insurers’ claims systems, and landing India’s first nationwide cashless-OPD insurer as a partner, are genuinely hard, valuable things to build — and MedPay’s own disclosures show it did both. But four years after that ICICI Lombard deal, the company was still reporting single-digit-crore revenue, a balance sheet that had to lean hard on debt to survive one fiscal year, and a headcount smaller than it was at the height of its early press coverage. Building the pipes is necessary. It is not, on its own, sufficient to prove the toll money is flowing — and the gap between the two is where a network business’s real story usually sits.

Frequently asked questions

What does MedPay do?

MedPay runs the Connected Care Network, an API infrastructure that connects standalone clinics, pharmacies and diagnostic labs to health insurers, enabling patients to get outpatient (OPD) care on a cashless basis instead of paying upfront and claiming reimbursement later.

Who founded MedPay and when?

MedPay was built by Ravi Chandra Merugu (CEO) and Arun Bhatia (CTO), and incorporated as Medway Technologies Private Limited on 4 April 2020 in Bengaluru, according to company records reviewed on Tofler and Tracxn.

How much funding has MedPay raised?

MedPay has raised at least $1.85 million across two disclosed seed rounds — about $646,000 in 2020 and $1.2 million in July 2021, both led by Entrepreneur First with GrowX Ventures also participating in the second round — plus a further undisclosed seed round in May 2024 backed by Turbostart, per Inc42 and Tracxn.

Is MedPay profitable?

MedPay’s profit or loss figures are not publicly disclosed. Its FY23 filings, analysed by Tofler, show net worth falling 89.2% and borrowings rising more than tenfold that year, while FY25 revenue grew 329.4% year-on-year to ₹10.8 crore, per Inc42 — but no public source confirms whether the company is currently profitable.

How big is MedPay’s network today?

The most recent publicly disclosed figure, from Business Today in July 2022, put MedPay’s Connected Care Network at more than 60,000 outpatient centres across over 500 cities and roughly 20 healthcare platforms. No updated network-size figure was found in public reporting since that date.

Sources

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

• Inc42, MedPay company profile, inc42.com/company/medpay, accessed September 2026
• Inc42, MedPay funding profile, inc42.com/company/medpay/funding, accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, MedPay company profile and financials, tracxn.com, accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, MedPay funding and investors, tracxn.com, accessed September 2026
• Tofler, Medway Technologies Private Limited company and financial filings summary, tofler.in, accessed September 2026
• Business Today, “Exclusive: Medtech start up Medpay to partner with Go Digit and Acko for cashless OPDs”, 4 July 2022
• Elets BFSI, “ICICI Lombard, MedWay Technologies partner to offer cashless OPD service”, December 2021
• IndiaMedToday, “MedPay connects primary health sector to cashless OPD insurance Network”, 31 July 2021
• BioSpectrum India, “#startupoftheday 134 – Medway Technologies Pvt Ltd (MedPay)”, 11 March 2022
• Startup Story Media, “API Platform Startup MedPay Raises Funding $1.2M From UK-Based EF And GrowX Ventures”, July 2021

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