Startup Deep Dive : Amaha (InnerHour) — the app that rebranded, then built a hospital

In FY25, Amaha lost more money (Rs 29.80 crore) than it earned in revenue two years earlier existed at all — the mental health platform’s topline was a mere Rs 3.85 crore in FY22. Yet nine years after two psychiatrists started it as a free self-help app called InnerHour, investors have just priced the company at roughly Rs 300 crore ($31 million), almost double what they paid fourteen months before.

The bet is that India’s mental health treatment gap — a market where, by the government’s own count, fewer psychiatrists exist than a mid-sized district hospital needs — is wide enough to fund years of losses before it needs to close. Amaha, formerly InnerHour, is now trying to prove that with a hybrid of app, therapist network and, since August 2025, its own psychiatric hospital.

Quick facts

What they do

Amaha sells access to mental health care to two kinds of buyer: individuals who pay for self-help tools, therapy or psychiatric consultations directly, and employers who buy emotional wellbeing programmes for their staff. The offering spans a free-and-paid mobile app, video and in-person therapy and psychiatric sessions delivered by an in-house clinical team, physical outpatient centres in three cities, and, since August 2025, inpatient hospital care in Bengaluru for conditions severe enough to need admission — schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, treatment-resistant depression and de-addiction among them.

The origin

Amit Malik trained as a psychiatrist, worked with the NHS in the UK, sat on the Council of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and later took a sabbatical from clinical work to advise healthcare clients at an investment bank, Allegro Capital Advisors. In 2016 he returned to India and started InnerHour with fellow psychiatrist Shefali Batra, betting that a country with a severe shortage of mental health professionals needed technology to stand in for the therapist’s couch, at least for the first, lowest-severity mile of care.

The company’s second founding story arrived three years later, in 2019, when Neha Kirpal joined as co-founder. Kirpal had spent the previous decade building the India Art Fair into the country’s leading contemporary art platform before stepping away from it in 2018. Her path to mental health was personal rather than professional: her mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia when Kirpal was a child in the 1980s, and in April 1994, when Kirpal was 13, her mother left home with her and her younger brother, leading to a separation from her father that lasted roughly a decade. That history, largely undiscussed in Indian households at the time, is the reason Kirpal has said she asks a question most clinicians do not: what is happening to the children in a house where a parent is unwell.

The struggle years

InnerHour’s first five years were capital-scarce by the standard of Indian consumer-tech peers. Its early backers were a small seed round from Batlivala & Karani Capital, Venture Works India and a handful of angel investors, and it took until 2021 — five years after founding — to close a proper Series A, of $5.24 million, led by Lightbox Ventures. In a market where mental health carried heavy stigma and therapy was rarely an insurable, budgeted expense, that gap reflects how hard the category was to underwrite for venture investors before the pandemic normalised talking about mental health.

The second struggle has been sustained, not sudden: every fiscal year on record shows losses growing alongside revenue. Filings compiled by TheKredible show losses widening from Rs 11.47 crore in FY22 to Rs 23.42 crore in FY23 — roughly doubling in a single year even as revenue also grew. By FY25, cumulative losses across just the four most recent disclosed years exceed Rs 92 crore, against cumulative revenue of about Rs 65 crore over the same span. The company has openly targeted EBITDA-level profitability only within 15–20 months of its March 2026 raise, according to founder Amit Malik — meaning as of this piece, on the company’s own timeline, it has not yet broken even.

The rebrand from InnerHour to Amaha, visible by May 2022, marked a deliberate pivot away from being known primarily as a self-help content app toward being an omnichannel clinical care company with physical centres — a bet that trust in mental healthcare is built in clinics and hospitals, not just inside an app.

The turning point

The clearest inflection in Amaha’s numbers sits between FY22 and FY23. Revenue jumped 3.3 times, from Rs 3.85 crore to Rs 12.76 crore, in the same window that the InnerHour-to-Amaha rebrand and its shift to physical, omnichannel care took hold. Losses also roughly doubled in that year, from Rs 11.47 crore to Rs 23.42 crore, as the company built out therapist headcount and outpatient centres in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi NCR to support the new model. It was the year Amaha stopped being primarily a content app and became a clinical operator with a balance sheet to match — bigger revenue, bigger losses, both at once.

The money behind it

• Seed: undisclosed amount from Batlivala & Karani Capital, Venture Works India and angel investors including Nikunj Jhaveri, Rahul Rege and Pallavi Kaul (pre-2021).
• Series A, 2021: $5.24 million led by Lightbox Ventures, with Capricorn Ventures, Micasa Investments (Singapore), Pankaj Sahni (CEO, Medanta–The Medicity) and Hitesh Oberoi (CEO & MD, Info Edge India) participating.
• Extended Series A, January 2024: $4.4 million led by Fireside Ventures, valuing the company at a reported Rs 177 crore.
• Extended Series A, March 2026: Rs 50 crore (~$5.2 million at then-prevailing rates), again led by Fireside Ventures, valuing Amaha at a reported Rs 300 crore — nearly double the January 2024 mark. Entrackr reported the round split as Fireside Ventures (Rs 18.07 crore), Shreyas Shibulal (Rs 13.55 crore) and existing investor Lightbox (Rs 9.3 crore); Digital Health News described the same round as Rs 36 crore from Fireside plus Rs 15.5 crore from angel investors and family offices — the two accounts differ on the exact split but agree on the Rs 50 crore total and Fireside’s lead role.
• Total disclosed funding: roughly $10 million as of the January 2024 round, taking the running total to somewhere around $15–16 million once the March 2026 tranche is added.

How it makes money

Amaha runs two revenue lines side by side.

• Direct-to-consumer (B2C): subscription fees for the self-care app, paid one-off or package fees for therapy and psychiatry consultations, and — from August 2025 — inpatient hospital charges at the Bengaluru facility.
• Business-to-business (B2B): corporate contracts for employee emotional wellbeing programmes with clients including Godrej, Cipla and Grant Thornton. Founder Amit Malik has stated this segment accounts for about 20% of overall revenue, as reported by Digital Health News.

Costs sit mainly in clinical headcount — Digital Health News reported more than 110 in-house therapists and psychiatrists as of the March 2026 round — plus, from FY26 onward, the fixed costs of running a licensed inpatient facility (staffing, beds, medical equipment) rather than just a therapist network paid per session. That shift toward owned physical infrastructure is the “part people get wrong”: Amaha is increasingly a healthcare operator with real estate and clinical staffing costs, not a pure-play app with software margins.

The numbers

• Revenue has grown every disclosed year: up 232% in FY23, 68% in FY24 and 29% in FY25 (YoY, on the figures above).
• Losses have grown every disclosed year too, but more slowly than revenue in percentage terms after FY23 — up 15% in FY24 and 10% in FY25 — narrowing the loss-to-revenue ratio from roughly 6:1 in FY22 to about 1.1:1 in FY25.

Where the money comes from

• By channel: roughly 80% direct-to-consumer (app subscriptions, therapy/psychiatry fees, and inpatient care from FY26) versus about 20% B2B corporate wellness contracts, as stated by founder Amit Malik (Digital Health News, 2026).
• By format: online (app, video therapy) plus offline outpatient centres in three metros (Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi NCR), plus one inpatient hospital in Bengaluru from August 2025.
• By scale claims: the company states more than 6 million users, 220,000 completed therapy sessions, 50,000 community members and 120 partnerships (company-stated figures, via Entrackr, 2026).

The surprise is less the channel split than the direction of travel: a company that started as a free, digital-first app now earns its newest revenue from a capital-intensive, physically-anchored 27-bed hospital — the opposite of the asset-light story most consumer-app investors originally bought into.

The risks

• Persistent cash burn: losses have exceeded revenue in every disclosed fiscal year through FY25 (Rs 29.80 crore lost against Rs 27.57 crore earned), and the company’s own EBITDA-breakeven target extends 15–20 months past its March 2026 raise — meaning further external funding is likely needed before profitability, per the company’s own timeline (Digital Health News).
• Concentrated, discretionary B2B revenue: about a fifth of revenue depends on a small set of named corporate clients (Godrej, Cipla, Grant Thornton); wellness budgets are typically among the first corporate line items cut in a downturn.
• Clinical talent and regulatory exposure: the business depends on retaining 110-plus licensed therapists and psychiatrists across 15-plus languages, and the new Bengaluru inpatient hospital brings it under stricter healthcare-facility regulation (staffing ratios, licensing under the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017) than a pure therapy-booking app faces.
• Crowded category: Amaha competes with other funded Indian mental health platforms, including Wysa and YourDOST, for both consumer attention and corporate wellness contracts, in a market where the IRDAI’s January 2025 mandate requiring health insurers to cover mental health treatment (therapy, counselling and psychiatric hospitalisation) could shift demand toward insurer-empanelled providers rather than direct-pay platforms like Amaha.

The takeaway

Amaha’s most transferable lesson is about sequencing capital intensity. It spent its first five years deliberately light — an app, seed capital, a handful of clinicians — because the category itself was unproven and stigmatised, and only after establishing revenue and clinical credibility did it add the expensive, hard-to-reverse infrastructure: outpatient centres, then a licensed inpatient hospital. Founders chasing an underserved but under-trusted market often want to build the full-service version on day one; Amaha’s numbers suggest that earning the right to be capital-intensive, one funding round and one year of proof at a time, is what let investors underwrite the leap from an app to a hospital operator without asking for it upfront.

Frequently asked questions

Is InnerHour the same company as Amaha?

Yes. InnerHour, founded in 2016 by Dr Amit Malik and Dr Shefali Batra, rebranded to Amaha, a name visible in company communications by May 2022, as the business expanded from a self-help app into outpatient clinics and, later, an inpatient hospital.

Who founded Amaha and when?

Psychiatrists Amit Malik and Shefali Batra started the company, as InnerHour, in 2016 in Mumbai. Social entrepreneur Neha Kirpal, previously the founder of the India Art Fair, joined as co-founder in 2019.

Is Amaha profitable?

No. Amaha reported a net loss of Rs 29.80 crore in FY25 against revenue of Rs 27.57 crore, and founder Amit Malik has said the company is targeting EBITDA-level profitability only 15–20 months after its March 2026 funding round.

How much money has Amaha raised, and at what valuation?

Disclosed rounds include a $5.24 million Series A in 2021, a $4.4 million extension in January 2024 (reported valuation Rs 177 crore) and a Rs 50 crore round in March 2026 that valued the company at a reported Rs 300 crore, according to Entrackr and Digital Health News.

What does Amaha actually sell?

A self-care mobile app, online and in-person therapy and psychiatry consultations, corporate emotional wellbeing programmes for employers such as Godrej and Cipla, and, since August 2025, inpatient psychiatric hospital care at a 27-bed facility in Bengaluru.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Mental health startup Amaha raises fresh capital at 2X valuation premium,” April 2026.
• Entrackr, “Funding and acquisitions in Indian startups this week (Mar 30–Apr 4),” April 2026.
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Mental health startup Amaha raises $4.4 Mn in Series A,” January 2024.
• TheKredible, “Amaha’s revenue crosses Rs 13 Cr in FY23, losses spike 2X,” 2023.
• Digital Health News, “Mental Healthtech Startup AMAHA Bags INR 50 Cr Funding Led By Fireside Ventures,” 2026.
• Inc42, “Mental Health Startup InnerHour Bags Series A Funding From Lightbox,” 2021.
• Global Indian, “Peace of mind at a click: Dr Amit Malik’s mental health app clocks 3 million downloads.”
• YourStory, “InnerHour, a pioneer startup in online mental health-care,” November 2017.
• The Better India, “At 13, Schizophrenia Tore Her Family Apart & Set Her on a Path To Transform Mental Healthcare in India,” 2026.
• Oneindia News, “Amaha Launches its First Private Super Specialty In-patient Mental Health Hospital in Bengaluru,” August 2025.
• BioSpectrum India, “Karnataka Health Minister Dinesh Gundu Rao inaugurates mental health hospital Amaha in Bengaluru,” August 2025.
• Watchdoq, “Mental Health Insurance in India 2025: Your Guide to Accessible Care,” on the IRDAI mental health coverage mandate.

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