In FY25 (year ended March 2025), ekincare’s operating revenue nearly doubled to ₹93.02 crore, and yet the company still ended the year ₹19.91 crore in the red. The bold part is not the losses; it is the market ekincare chose. Its founders built a preventive-health app for Indian consumers, discovered that Indians were not willing to pay to look after their own health, and then flipped the business 180 degrees to sell that same care to the people who are willing to pay for it: employers.
That single pivot, made in 2016, turned a struggling business-to-consumer medical-records app into one of India’s larger corporate health-benefits platforms, now used by more than 1,400 enterprises including Capgemini, GSK, BlackRock, Toyota, McKinsey and KPMG (Inc42, September 2026). This is the story of how a Seattle engineer worried about his ageing parents built that company, the near-death restructuring it survived along the way, and the question that still hangs over it: can a wellness platform that loses money on every rupee of growth ever turn a profit?
Quick facts
| Company | ekincare (legal entity: Aayuv Technologies Private Limited) |
| Founded | Incorporated 8 September 2014, ROC Hyderabad (per Tracxn/MCA); brand launched 2014-15 |
| Founder(s) | Kiran Kalakuntla (CEO) and Srikanth Samudrala (CTO); Dr Noel Coutinho named as co-founder (Inc42) |
| Businesses | Full-stack corporate health-benefits and employee-wellness platform (B2B SaaS + managed marketplace) |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹93.02 crore in FY25, up 71.1% from ₹54.38 crore in FY24 (Inc42/MCA) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss of ₹19.91 crore in FY25, narrowed from ₹24.67 crore in FY24 (Inc42) |
| Listed | Private (unlisted) as of September 2026 |
| Last valuation | ₹298 crore post-money at the March 2022 Series B (Inc42); no updated valuation disclosed for the April 2025 round |
| Key backers / CEO | CEO Kiran Kalakuntla; investors include HealthQuad, Ventureast, Eight Roads Ventures, Sabre Partners, Endiya Partners, Siana Capital and MSD (IDEA Studio Asia Pacific) |
What ekincare does
ekincare sells preventive and primary healthcare to companies, not to individuals. An employer buys the platform, and its staff and their families get a single app for health check-ups, doctor consultations, medicine delivery, mental-health support, gym access and health-risk assessments, while the HR team gets dashboards on how a workforce is actually using it.
- Buyers: large employers, typically with a minimum of around 500 employees (Inc42). More than 1,400 enterprises used the platform as of September 2026, including Capgemini, GSK, BlackRock, Toyota, McKinsey and KPMG (Inc42).
- Delivery: an asset-light network. ekincare owns no hospitals or labs and instead routes care through a stated 50,000+ healthcare providers, including diagnostics chains, telemedicine doctors, pharmacies and fitness partners (Inc42), reaching 50+ Indian cities via 500+ certified diagnostic centres (StartupTalky).
- Product direction: an AI layer branded “elva.AI”, positioned as an intelligent health companion, plus a cross-border pilot into Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines (Inc42, September 2026).
The origin: a son, a surgery, an app
The founding insight was personal and unglamorous. Kiran Kalakuntla, a Duke University graduate who had spent more than a decade building and marketing technology products (he has said he worked on 30-plus products, including Motorola’s Moto X, and managed roughly $100 million in product sales at AT&T), was living in the United States while his parents aged in Hyderabad. When his father needed surgery, Kiran found that no one could clearly explain the medical reasoning from thousands of miles away. He started building a tool to track and make sense of his parents’ health records remotely.
That tool became ekincare, incorporated as Aayuv Technologies Private Limited in September 2014. Srikanth Samudrala, an IIT Madras graduate (2007) with roughly seven years in senior technology roles at firms such as Barclays and HSBC and a prior open-source venture, Teamroq, joined as co-founder and CTO after meeting Kiran through a mutual contact. The early product was consumer-facing: a place for individuals to digitise medical records and manage their own preventive care. The idea was sound. The market was not there yet.
The struggle years
The first version of ekincare ran into a wall that has broken many Indian health startups: people would not pay to prevent illness they did not yet have. As Kiran put it bluntly, “preventive healthcare is not still popular in India.” Srikanth was blunter about the consumer app: “people in India were not ready for a personalised product that helps them take care of their health.”
- 2014-15: launched as a B2C personal-health-records and preventive-care app, backed by a small seed round of roughly ₹1 crore / about $161K-$200K from BitKemy Ventures and Adroitent (StartupTalky, Inc42).
- By ~2016, after about 18 months, consumer traction was weak enough that the founders concluded the strategy could not work as built.
- FY23 (year ended March 2023): even after the pivot, losses ballooned. Net loss reached ₹47.27 crore and the EBITDA margin sank to roughly -116% (Inc42), a level that forced a hard reset.
- FY23 restructuring: ekincare cut headcount by about half, from roughly 320 people to around 160, and later said automation had replaced about 25% of payroll in some tech teams (Inc42).
The struggle, in short, was twofold: first proving that the product had any paying market at all, then proving the business could grow without burning itself down.
The turning point
The decisive moment was the 2016 pivot. “We had to shift our strategy 180 degrees,” Srikanth said. “We did that in 2016, and shifted our focus to corporates.” Instead of asking individuals to pay for their own prevention, ekincare sold the same care to employers, who had both a budget and a clear incentive: healthier staff, lower medical-insurance costs and a benefit that helps retention.
The numbers on either side of that decision tell the story. The consumer business had struggled to build a paying base at all. The corporate business, once it took hold, produced measurable, compounding revenue: operating revenue climbed from ₹40.87 crore in FY23 to ₹54.38 crore in FY24 (up 33%) and then to ₹93.02 crore in FY25 (up 71.1%), while the platform grew to more than 1,400 enterprise clients (Inc42). Crucially, losses shrank even as revenue accelerated, from a ₹47.27 crore net loss in FY23 to ₹19.91 crore in FY25, the pattern a wellness platform needs if it is ever to reach profit.
The money behind it
ekincare has raised modestly by health-tech standards, and its cap table leans toward healthcare-focused investors rather than generalist growth funds.
- Seed, January 2015: roughly ₹1 crore (about $161K), from BitKemy Ventures and Adroitent (StartupTalky, Inc42).
- Early rounds, 2016-2019: a series of small raises, including a reported $3.6 million round in November 2019 involving existing backers such as Ventureast and Eight Roads (Entrepreneur India, Inc42).
- Series B, March 2022: $15 million (about ₹133 crore, as reported) at a ₹298 crore post-money valuation, led by HealthQuad and Sabre Partners with participation from Ventureast, Eight Roads Ventures, Siana Capital and Endiya Partners (Inc42).
- Strategic round, April 2025: an undisclosed strategic investment from MSD through its IDEA Studio Asia Pacific initiative, with existing backer HealthQuad participating (Medical Dialogues, BioSpectrum Asia, eHealth Magazine).
Total capital raised is reported in a range across trackers, from about $22 million (Fundz, as of the April 2025 round) to roughly $28 million on some databases. Two things stand out: the entry of MSD, a global pharmaceutical company, as a strategic rather than purely financial backer; and the continued presence of HealthQuad and Endiya, healthcare specialists who first backed the company years earlier.
How it makes money
ekincare runs a managed marketplace on top of a subscription. Money comes in from employers; costs go out to the provider network; the margin sits in the gap between the fee an employer pays and what ekincare pays partners to deliver care, plus whatever it can automate.
- Money in: per-employee subscription fees paid by corporations for platform access, plus revenue from bundling and underwriting service packages (health check-ups, teleconsults, pharmacy) delivered through partners (Inc42).
- Costs out: payments to the 50,000+ provider network for the actual care delivered, plus technology, sales and support. Total expenses were ₹113.1 crore in FY25 against ₹93.02 crore of revenue (Inc42), which is why the year still ran a loss.
- Where the margin sits: in utilisation and automation. Because ekincare owns no clinics, its gross economics improve when more of the workforce uses digital-first services (teleconsults, app-based assessments) rather than costlier physical ones, and when routine operations are automated.
- The part people get wrong: a health-benefits platform is not paid more when employees are sick; it is paid a subscription to keep them well and engaged. Its problem is not demand but engagement, average monthly active usage was around 32% of covered employees, with roughly 60% program enrolment (Inc42). Low engagement weakens the value story to the employer at renewal.
The numbers
Three years of financials show a business scaling revenue while deliberately shrinking losses. All figures in ₹ crore, sourced from Inc42’s reporting on ekincare’s MCA filings.
| Fiscal year | Operating revenue (₹ crore) | Net loss (₹ crore) |
| FY23 (ended Mar 2023) | 40.87 | 47.27 |
| FY24 (ended Mar 2024) | 54.38 (+33% YoY) | 24.67 |
| FY25 (ended Mar 2025) | 93.02 (+71.1% YoY) | 19.91 |
- FY25 total expenses: ₹113.1 crore (Inc42).
- FY25 estimated EBITDA: about -₹18.9 crore (Inc42).
- Loss trajectory: net loss fell from ₹47.27 crore (FY23) to ₹24.67 crore (FY24) to ₹19.91 crore (FY25) even as revenue more than doubled over the same span (Inc42).
- Management target: the CEO has stated an aim of EBITDA breakeven by FY26 with 60-70% revenue growth (Inc42), a company-stated goal, not an audited outcome.
Where the money comes from
The revenue base is concentrated in a specific customer type and increasingly in specific usage patterns.
- Customer type: mid-to-large enterprises, typically 500+ employees, are the core buyers (Inc42). Much of the client roster is made up of multinationals and large Indian employers such as Capgemini, GSK, BlackRock, Toyota, McKinsey and KPMG.
- Geography: predominantly India across 50+ cities today, with an early cross-border pilot into Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines) that is not yet a material revenue line (Inc42).
- The surprise: the constraint on this model is not signing clients but getting employees to use the benefit. With average monthly active usage around 32% and enrolment near 60% (Inc42), roughly two in three covered employees are inactive in a given month, so a large part of “where the money comes from” is renewals that depend on lifting that engagement.
- Market context: ekincare estimates a roughly $7 billion addressable opportunity, framed as about 4% of India’s preventive-healthcare market, within a corporate-wellness market it cites growing from about $1.6 billion in 2025 toward $3.3 billion by 2033 (Inc42). These are company-stated and third-party projections, not booked revenue.
The risks
- Path to profit still unproven. ekincare has narrowed losses but has not reported a profitable year; FY25 expenses of ₹113.1 crore exceeded revenue of ₹93.02 crore (Inc42). The FY26 breakeven goal is management guidance, and if growth slows before costs are covered, the company would need fresh capital on terms set by a soft funding market.
- Engagement risk at renewal. With about 32% monthly active usage (Inc42), the platform’s core promise, healthier, more engaged employees, is only partly realised. Low usage makes it harder to prove return on investment to HR buyers, which is the mechanism by which multi-year contracts get renewed or cut.
- Client and category concentration. Revenue leans on large enterprises whose HR and benefits budgets are cyclical; a downturn in corporate spending, or the loss of a few marquee accounts, would hit revenue directly. The company competes with a crowded field including Plum, Onsurity, MediBuddy, Advantage Club and Truworth Wellness, which pressures pricing and take rates.
The takeaway
ekincare’s most valuable decision was to stop arguing with its market. The founders believed Indians should invest in preventive health; the market, for years, disagreed. Rather than spend more to change consumer behaviour, they found the buyer whose incentives already pointed the same way, the employer, and sold the identical care through that door. The transferable lesson is not “pivot to B2B.” It is narrower and harder: when a good product will not sell, the problem is often not the product or the price but who is being asked to pay. Change the payer, and a business that looked impossible can start to compound, as ekincare’s climb from ₹40.87 crore to ₹93.02 crore in revenue over two years shows. Whether it can finish the job and turn that growth into profit is the test of its next chapter.
Frequently asked questions
What does ekincare do?
ekincare is a corporate health-benefits and employee-wellness platform. Employers buy it, and their staff get an app for health check-ups, doctor consultations, medicine delivery, mental-health support and health-risk assessments, delivered through a large third-party network of providers rather than clinics ekincare owns.
Who founded ekincare and when?
It was founded by Kiran Kalakuntla (CEO) and Srikanth Samudrala (CTO), with Dr Noel Coutinho also named as a co-founder by Inc42. The legal entity, Aayuv Technologies Private Limited, was incorporated on 8 September 2014 in Hyderabad, and the brand launched around 2014-15.
How much money has ekincare raised?
Reported total funding ranges from about $22 million to roughly $28 million across trackers. Notable rounds include a $15 million Series B in March 2022 at a ₹298 crore post-money valuation, and an undisclosed strategic investment from MSD’s IDEA Studio Asia Pacific in April 2025.
Is ekincare profitable?
Not yet. In FY25 it reported operating revenue of ₹93.02 crore against total expenses of ₹113.1 crore, for a net loss of ₹19.91 crore. Losses have narrowed steadily from ₹47.27 crore in FY23, and management has stated a goal of EBITDA breakeven by FY26.
How does ekincare make money?
Mainly through per-employee subscription fees paid by corporations, plus revenue from bundling health services delivered by its partner network. Because it owns no physical care infrastructure, its margins improve with higher digital-first usage and automation; its main challenge is lifting employee engagement, which averaged around 32% monthly active use.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026 and carry the fiscal period stated in each line. Financials reflect ekincare’s statutory filings as reported by the outlets below.
- Inc42, “Ekincare Built A Corporate Wellness Ecosystem; Will Profitability Follow?” (September 2026)
- Inc42, ekincare company financials page (September 2026)
- Tracxn, Aayuv Technologies Private Limited legal-entity profile (2026)
- StartupTalky, ekincare success story (2026)
- Entrepreneur India, “The Techie Caretaker” profile of Kiran Kalakuntla (2018)
- Medical Dialogues, “ekincare raises investment from MSD IDEA Studio Asia Pacific” (April/May 2025)
- BioSpectrum Asia, “India’s ekincare raises strategic investment from MSD IDEA Studio Asia Pacific” (2025)
- eHealth Magazine (Elets), ekincare-MSD strategic investment (May 2025)
- Fundz, ekincare funding round record (April 2025)
Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.