Startup Deep Dive : CureBay — revenue jumped 466% in FY25 as losses widened

CureBay’s revenue grew 466.6% to ₹70.4 crore ($7.3 million) in the year to March 2025, one of the steepest jumps posted by any Indian healthtech company that year. In the same twelve months the Bhubaneswar startup lost ₹58.1 crore, per Inc42’s compilation of its filings — a shortfall larger than everything it earned.

That gap is the whole story of CureBay. It is a bet that you can sell primary healthcare to some of India’s poorest rural households, at membership prices of a few hundred rupees a month, and eventually make the arithmetic work. Four years in, two of its operating circles turn an operational profit and the rest are still burning cash. This is a look at how a former Microsoft and Google executive built a network of village clinics in Odisha, who paid for it, and why the losses are growing as fast as the revenue.

Quick facts

What CureBay does

CureBay sells primary healthcare to rural households that live too far from a doctor. It does this through a hybrid model it calls “phygital”: a physical clinic in the village, wired to doctors sitting elsewhere. A patient walks into a CureBay eClinic staffed by a local nurse-phlebotomist and a pharmacist, who take vitals with connected devices such as a digital stethoscope, then run a video consultation with a remote doctor. Medicine and lab tests are fulfilled on the spot or delivered. The design deliberately avoids depending on the patient owning a smartphone or a reliable internet connection.

• Physical footprint: 150-plus eClinics across 32 districts of Odisha and Chhattisgarh as of May 2025 (Entrepreneur India, Entrackr).
• Around 80% of consultations are conducted remotely with doctors, with local staff handling the in-person assessment (FounderThesis interview with the CEO).
• An on-ground workforce of 1,000-plus “Swasthya Mitras” — health workers, many of them retired teachers and NGO staff — makes household visits and runs AI-assisted screening for dental, skin and lung conditions (Inc42).
• Patients served: about 5.5 lakh unique patients reported at the Series B in May 2025 (Entrepreneur India), rising to a company-stated 7.6 lakh in later disclosures (Inc42).
• Ecosystem partners: 300-plus service providers, including 240-plus doctors, 170-plus hospitals and 35-plus diagnostic labs (Inc42).

The origin: a Skype ID and a broken system

The founding moment was almost absurd. During the COVID-19 lockdown, a private hospital asked Priyadarshi Mohapatra for his Skype ID so his wife could have a teleconsultation. Mohapatra had spent years running Microsoft’s consumer business in India. As he told the FounderThesis podcast, his reaction was disbelief: “I used to head Microsoft’s consumer business. Skype was a product of mine. Who is using Skype in today’s day and age?” If the system was that broken for a well-connected family in a city, he reasoned, it was catastrophic in the villages.

Mohapatra is a second-time founder with more than two decades in enterprise and consumer technology — country roles at Microsoft, a stint as a Google Cloud executive, and earlier spells at SAP, Avaya, Sun Microsystems and Titan (Inc42, Elevar Equity). Before all of that he co-founded Oyzterbay, a venture-funded branded-jewellery chain that was later acquired by Fossil. He started CureBay in 2021 with Sanjay Swain and Shobhan Mahapatra, basing it in his home state of Odisha rather than in Bengaluru or Delhi.

The problem he set out to attack is structural, not anecdotal. Roughly 70% of Indians live in rural areas, yet close to 65% of the country’s healthcare infrastructure sits in cities, Mohapatra has said. The doctor-to-patient ratio in rural India runs at about 1:11,082 against the World Health Organization’s benchmark of 1:1,000, according to figures CureBay cites in Inc42’s reporting. His thesis was that you cannot fix that by asking villagers to download an app — you have to put a staffed clinic within reach and pipe the scarce doctors in over video.

The struggle years

CureBay’s difficulty is not a single near-death event; it is the grind of building physical infrastructure in places where the customer has almost no money to spend. Every eClinic is a fixed cost — rent, two salaried staff, equipment — that has to be recovered a few hundred rupees at a time. The company has been candid that scale came before profit, and the filings show it.

The early years were spent proving that villagers would even use a clinic run by a nurse and a screen. Insurance penetration in the communities CureBay serves runs below 1%, so almost every rupee is out-of-pocket, and rural families historically spend a large share of household income on health shocks (Elevar Equity). Building trust in low-digital-adoption areas, keeping trained staff in remote postings, and holding a remote-doctor roster together were all slow, unglamorous problems. By the founder’s own account, an individual eClinic takes 18 to 20 months to reach breakeven (FounderThesis), which means every wave of new clinics deepens the loss before it ever helps it. That is precisely the pattern the numbers below show: revenue multiplying, and losses multiplying alongside it.

The turning point

The inflection was the shift from a pilot in a handful of Odisha districts to a genuine multi-district network, funded by outside capital. When Elevar Equity led CureBay’s Series A in 2022, the company was still an early experiment. By the January 2024 Series A1, it was running more than 90 eClinics; by the May 2025 Series B it was past 150 clinics across 32 districts and two states, with more than five lakh patients treated (Digital Health News, Entrepreneur India).

The financial proof point arrived in FY25. Revenue that had been a rounding error two years earlier reached ₹70.4 crore, a 466.6% jump on FY24 (Inc42), and the RoC filing for the year records essentially the same figure at ₹70.41 crore (Tofler/Zauba Corp). CureBay also began pointing to specific circles — Balasore and Puri — that it says have crossed into operational profitability (Entrepreneur India, Inc42), the first evidence that a mature cluster of rural clinics can pay for itself even as the overall company still loses money on expansion.

The money behind it

CureBay has raised its equity in three disclosed rounds, all with Elevar Equity anchoring the early stages and a global media group leading the growth round.

• Series A — 2022: about ₹50 crore ($6.1 million), led by Elevar Equity (multiple trackers).
• Series A1 — January 2024: about $7.4-7.5 million (roughly ₹62 crore), again led by Elevar Equity with participation from founders and leadership; the company was running 90-plus clinics at the time (Digital Health News, Entrackr).
• Series B — 20 May 2025: $21 million (reported at roughly ₹175-179.5 crore), led by Bertelsmann India Investments, with new investor British International Investment and existing backer Elevar Equity. Entrackr broke the round down as roughly ₹94 crore from Bertelsmann, ₹34 crore from British International Investment and ₹31 crore from Elevar (Entrackr, Entrepreneur India, Inc42).

• Total raised: reported at $34.58 million-plus by Inc42 and about $37 million by Entrackr across the equity rounds.
• Latest valuation: about ₹625 crore ($75 million) post-money after the Series B, per Tracxn’s shareholding data (as of May 2025) and Entrackr’s reporting — two independent sources that agree on the ballpark.
• Named backers and what they bring: Elevar Equity, an impact-focused fund, gave CureBay its first institutional validation and a board seat (Jyotsna Krishnan); Bertelsmann India Investments brought the largest single cheque and growth-stage backing; British International Investment, the UK’s development finance institution, brought development capital aimed explicitly at underserved-market healthcare.
• Inc42’s feature on the company also lists Stride Ventures, InCred Capital and Hemani Industries among its backers, indicating additional debt or strategic funding beyond the priced equity rounds.

How CureBay makes money

CureBay earns from the visit and everything attached to it, plus a recurring membership that is the strategic core of the model.

• Consultations: paid teleconsultations conducted at the eClinic (Inc42).
• Pharmacy: sale of medicines dispensed or delivered through the clinic (Inc42).
• Diagnostics: pathology and radiology tests, run in-house or through its 35-plus lab partners (Inc42).
• Referral fees: commissions from partner hospitals when patients are referred up the chain for procedures (Inc42).
• Memberships: a preventive-care/annual health plan — the CEO has described a “Kavach” membership at ₹499 a month that bundles unlimited GP consultations, specialist access, medicine credits and hospitalisation cover (FounderThesis). At the Series B, CureBay reported about 90,000 active preventive-care members with a renewal rate above 60% (Entrepreneur India).

The unit economics are tight by design. Each eClinic carries a monthly operating cost the founder has put at roughly ₹35,000-₹55,000 (FounderThesis), staffed by two people, and takes 18-20 months to break even. The margin has to come from volume and from the membership base, which turns a one-off sick visit into predictable recurring revenue — the part of the model outsiders most often miss. The recurring membership, not the individual consultation, is what CureBay is really selling.

The numbers

CureBay’s revenue and losses have moved together, which is what you would expect from a business adding fixed-cost clinics as fast as it can. The figures below are drawn from RoC filings as compiled by Inc42 and Entrackr; where the two diverge, both are shown, in ₹ crore.

• Revenue growth FY24 to FY25: +466.6% (Inc42).
• FY25 total expenses reported at ₹27.7 crore, up about 42% YoY, with an estimated EBITDA of roughly -₹53.5 crore (Inc42).
• Gross merchandise value, a wider measure than booked revenue, is reported to have risen from ₹1.9 crore in FY23 to ₹22 crore in FY24 (about 18x) to ₹100 crore-plus in FY25 (Inc42’s feature reporting).
• The FY24 loss figure is not settled: Entrackr’s RoC analysis puts it at about ₹39 crore (up 2.4x), while an Inc42 feature cited a lower FY24 loss of ₹17.26 crore and an FY23 loss of ₹14.08 crore. Both are reproduced here rather than picking one, and the divergence is worth noting when reading any single headline number.
• The CEO has referred to an annualised revenue run-rate of about ₹128.4 crore in late 2024 (FounderThesis) — a company-stated forward figure, not an audited annual result, and higher than the ₹70.4 crore FY25 booked revenue.

Where the money comes from

CureBay’s revenue is concentrated by geography and, increasingly, by clinic maturity rather than by a single product line.

• Geography: as of the May 2025 Series B, the entire operating base was in Odisha and Chhattisgarh, across 32 districts (Entrackr, Entrepreneur India). The company has announced expansion into Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, with a stated target of roughly 800 new clinics across 16 “circles” within two years (Inc42).
• By clinic maturity: the surprise in the mix is that profitability is a function of age, not product. CureBay says its Balasore and Puri circles — among its oldest — have reached operational profitability, while newer circles drag the blended result (Entrepreneur India). Each clinic needs 18-20 months to break even, so revenue quality improves as a circle seasons.
• By stream: revenue comes from consultations, pharmacy, diagnostics, referral fees and memberships (Inc42). The company has not published an audited breakdown of the split, so any product-level percentage would be guesswork and is left out here.
• Recurring vs one-off: the ~90,000 preventive-care members with 60%-plus renewal (Entrepreneur India) give CureBay a recurring layer beneath the transactional pharmacy-and-diagnostics revenue.

The risks

• Losses larger than revenue. In FY25 CureBay lost ₹58.1 crore against ₹70.4 crore of revenue, an implied net margin near -109% (Inc42). A business burning at that rate depends on continuous fundraising; any tightening of healthtech funding directly threatens the expansion plan.
• Fragile rural unit economics. Average revenue per patient is low, memberships are priced in the hundreds of rupees, and every new clinic loses money for 18-20 months before breakeven (FounderThesis). Only two named circles are profitable so far, so the model’s core claim — that seasoned clusters pay for themselves — is proven at small scale, not across the network.
• Execution risk on a fourfold geographic jump. Moving from two states to six, and from 150 clinics toward a stated 800-plus, multiplies the hardest parts of the business: recruiting and retaining local staff, keeping a remote-doctor roster stocked, and maintaining care quality far from head office (Inc42).
• Competition and substitution. Urban-focused digital health players such as Tata 1mg and PharmEasy can move down-market, and government schemes like Ayushman Bharat and public primary health centres compete for the same patients — often for free (Inc42). CureBay’s edge is physical presence and trust, both of which are expensive to defend.
• Concentration. The revenue base is still overwhelmingly in Odisha and Chhattisgarh, exposing CureBay to state-level regulatory, weather and demand shocks until the new-state clinics mature.

The takeaway

CureBay is a reminder that in rural healthcare, the physical clinic is the product, not the app. Mohapatra’s insight was not a clever piece of software; it was the recognition that you have to put a staffed room within walking distance and then use technology to bring the scarce resource — the doctor — to it. The transferable lesson for founders chasing “Bharat” markets is that the hard, slow, capital-heavy path can be the defensible one. Anyone can build a telemedicine app; very few will spend four years and hundreds of crores wiring up village clinics one nurse at a time. The open question CureBay has not yet answered is whether that moat can be crossed into profit before the funding runs out. Two profitable circles say maybe; a ₹58.1 crore annual loss says not yet.

Frequently asked questions

What does CureBay do?

CureBay runs a hybrid rural healthcare network in India. Patients visit a physical “eClinic” staffed by a local nurse and pharmacist, who take vitals with connected devices and set up a video consultation with a remote doctor. It also sells medicines, diagnostics and a preventive-care membership, and deploys on-ground health workers called Swasthya Mitras for household visits.

Who founded CureBay and when?

CureBay was founded in 2021 (the legal entity, CureBay Technologies Private Limited, was incorporated in December 2020) by Priyadarshi Mohapatra, Sanjay Swain and Shobhan Mahapatra, and is based in Bhubaneswar, Odisha. Mohapatra, the CEO, previously held senior roles at Microsoft and Google and co-founded the jewellery chain Oyzterbay.

How much money has CureBay raised?

Across three disclosed equity rounds — a 2022 Series A, a January 2024 Series A1 and a May 2025 Series B of $21 million led by Bertelsmann India Investments — CureBay has raised a reported $34.58 million-plus (Inc42), or about $37 million per Entrackr. Its post-money valuation after the Series B was reported at about ₹625 crore ($75 million).

Is CureBay profitable?

No, not at the company level. In FY25 it reported revenue of ₹70.4 crore and a net loss of ₹58.1 crore (Inc42). However, the company says two of its oldest operating circles, Balasore and Puri, have reached operational profitability, and individual clinics are said to break even 18-20 months after opening.

Where does CureBay operate?

As of May 2025, CureBay ran more than 150 eClinics across 32 districts of Odisha and Chhattisgarh (Entrackr, Entrepreneur India). It has announced plans to expand into Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, targeting roughly 800 more clinics within two years.

Sources

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

• Inc42 — CureBay company profile and financials (revenue, loss, EBITDA, expenses, headcount), 2026
• Inc42 — “Can CureBay’s Doorstep Care Model Bridge India’s Rural Health Gap?” (model, GMV, losses, backers), 2025
• Inc42 — “CureBay Raises $21 Mn To Improve Healthcare In Rural India” (Series B), May 2025
• Entrackr — “CureBay raises $21 Mn in Series B round led by Bertelsmann India” (round breakdown, valuation, FY24 financials), May 2025
• Entrepreneur India — “CureBay Raises USD 21 Mn Series B to Scale Rural Healthcare Delivery” (investors, members, profitability), May 2025
• Digital Health News — “Healthtech Startup CureBay Secures $7.4 Mn…” (Series A1, clinic count), 2024
• FounderThesis — interview with Priyadarshi Mohapatra (“Skype ID” origin, membership pricing, clinic economics, ARR), 2024/2025
• Elevar Equity — “Meet an EPIC Entrepreneur: Priyadarshi Mohapatra, CureBay” (founder background, market problem), 2023
• Tracxn — CureBay shareholding and valuation (₹625 crore, May 2025), 2026
• Zauba Corp / Tofler — CureBay Technologies Private Limited (CIN, incorporation, directors, FY25 RoC revenue ₹70.41 crore), 2026
• Trading Economics — USD/INR reference rate, 18 September 2026

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