Startup Deep Dive : Healthians — at-home diagnostics turns its first profit after a decade of losses

Healthians will send a phlebotomist to your doorstep before you have finished your coffee, draw your blood, and text you a lab report by lunchtime — a promise it has now delivered across more than 250 Indian cities. In the year ended March 2026, the Gurugram-based company posted its first-ever net profit: ₹5.4 crore on revenue of ₹357 crore ($37.2 million), as reported by Entrackr from Healthians’ financial filings.

That headline hides an uncomfortable number. Even in this profitable year, Healthians was still carrying ₹976 crore of accumulated losses on its books, built up over roughly a decade of red ink. The turnaround also arrived only after the founder who endured twelve investor rejections to start the company sold down his stake and stepped out of the chief executive’s chair. One profitable year does not erase a decade of losses — but for a category once dismissed as an unsustainable discount business, it is a number worth explaining.

Quick facts

What they do

Healthians sells preventive health testing to individual consumers who would rather not sit in a diagnostic centre’s waiting room. A customer books a blood test or a full-body checkup package through the Healthians app or website, a phlebotomist visits their home or office to draw the sample, and the sample is processed at one of the company’s own laboratories, with results delivered digitally, typically within a day. The company says it operates in more than 300 Indian cities with a network of over 22 owned laboratories as of January 2026, a scale-up from the 250 cities and 20 labs it reported earlier, according to statements carried by The Tribune and cited on Wikipedia. Its pitch runs from single blood markers to elaborate wellness packages; a CEO-cited example is a full-body checkup covering more than 80 tests priced under $15 per person, aimed squarely at cost-conscious, first-time preventive testers rather than patients already in a hospital’s care.

The origin

Deepak Sahni did not start out in healthcare. At 19, he borrowed ₹2 lakh from a relative and opened a computer hardware and repair shop, selling around 120 machines before larger players like IBM pushed small assemblers out of the market by the early 2000s. He pivoted to software, taking a ₹3 lakh loan from Deutsche Bank to found SWT Services, a web design shop that landed an early ₹1 lakh contract animating content for T-Series. A chance meeting with two Apollo Hospitals doctors nudged SWT into medical tourism marketing — building lead-generation websites with names like “Knee Replacement India” that pulled in roughly ten enquiries a day from overseas patients seeking surgery in India, as Sahni later recounted to The Weekend Leader.

It was that vantage point, watching families sell assets to pay for treatment, that pushed him toward prevention instead of cure. By 2013 he had started asking himself, in his own words, whether he was “doing something good.” He sold both his earlier companies in 2014 for a combined ₹5 crore and, on his wife’s suggestion, launched a discounted pathology-test booking site called healthcheckdeals.com late that year. Six months on, he rebranded it Healthians, built around a simple founding insight: most Indians only test for disease after symptoms appear, and a cheaper, more convenient at-home model could pull that behaviour forward into routine prevention.

The struggle years

The idea was not an easy sell to investors. Sahni has said he faced twelve consecutive funding rejections before Healthians found its first backer — cricketer Yuvraj Singh, who invested ₹1 crore through his YouWeCan Ventures foundation in 2015 and gave the fledgling company both capital and credibility. Even after the company found its feet commercially, its finances stayed difficult for years longer than the funding rounds suggested. Revenue climbed from ₹167 crore in FY22 to ₹224 crore in FY23, a 34.1% jump, but losses grew even faster — up 54.6% to ₹184 crore in the same year, with the company spending roughly ₹1.88 to earn every rupee of operating revenue and an EBITDA margin of around negative 61.4%, according to Entrackr’s review of its FY23 filings.

Regulatory scrutiny added to the pressure during the pandemic. In October 2021, a complaint alleged Healthians was collecting COVID-19 samples without the required licence; Gurugram Police subsequently filed an affidavit with the Delhi High Court confirming the company’s labs held ICMR and NABL accreditation and stating that Healthians “never performed any COVID-19 test till April 15, 2021,” having only handled sample collection under a memorandum of understanding, as reported by the Hindustan Times. The episode was resolved in the company’s favour, but it captured the compliance risk that comes with running consumer-facing diagnostics at scale — one misstep away from a licensing dispute.

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after in Healthians’ numbers sits between FY25 and FY26. In FY25, the company posted a net loss of about ₹5 crore on operating revenue of ₹263 crore, having already clawed its way to a positive EBITDA of ₹32 crore. A year later, revenue jumped 35.7% to ₹357 crore and the company booked a net profit of ₹5.4 crore — its first in roughly eleven years of operation, per Entrackr’s analysis of its FY26 filings. The swing came alongside a leadership change: Nishant Singhal, an early angel backer through YouWeCan Ventures and Healthians’ chief operating officer between May 2020 and July 2023, was named CEO and board member in July 2025, with founder Deepak Sahni selling down his stake and stepping back from an executive role, according to reporting carried by The Tribune. The company has framed the period as “Healthians 3.0” — a shift from growth-at-any-cost to unit economics: by FY26, it was spending about ₹1.02 to generate every rupee of operating revenue, down from ₹1.88 three years earlier.

The money behind it

Healthians’ capital-raising followed a fairly conventional arc for an Indian consumer-health startup, once it got past its rejection-heavy first year:

• 2015, seed: ₹1 crore from Yuvraj Singh’s YouWeCan Ventures — the company’s first believer after twelve rejections, and the capital that let it build its early booking platform.
• 2016, Series A: $3 million from Japan’s BeeNext, as reported by Inc42, funding early city expansion beyond Delhi-NCR.
• November 2019, Series B: $12 million led by Japan-based DG Incubation and DG Daiwa Ventures, with Kotak Private Equity, Trifecta Capital, Tokio Marine and Mistletoe also participating, per VCCircle’s reporting (cited via Wikipedia) — capital the company used to widen its city footprint and start building its own lab network rather than depend entirely on partner labs.
• January 2022, Series C: $54 million led by WestBridge Capital, with Trifecta Capital, Konark Trust and MMPL Trust also investing, at a reported valuation of $300 million, per Inc42 — WestBridge has since become the company’s anchor investor.
• January 2026: WestBridge made a further, undisclosed investment described by the company as “doubling down” on Healthians, alongside continuing backing from BeeNext and Evolvence Fund, as covered by The Tribune; a separate funding tracker, Tracxn, records this as an additional round dated 16 January 2026.

Cumulative fundraising is a genuinely contested number. Entrackr put total funding at $22.8 million as of June 2021, before the Series C. By 2026, data platform Tracxn counted $80.1 million raised across 11 rounds, while Healthians’ own leadership told The Tribune in January 2026 that the company had raised “over $100 million” from WestBridge, BeeNext and Evolvence Fund. This piece uses the range: roughly $80 million to just over $100 million raised in total, reported as of January 2026, with WestBridge Capital as the single most consequential backer of the post-2022 period.

How it makes money

Healthians earns almost all of its money the plain way: by running lab tests and charging for them, not through a marketplace commission or a subscription layer.

• Core revenue line: income from running its own pathology laboratories made up about 99% of operating revenue in both FY24 (₹240.5 crore of ₹243 crore) and FY26 (₹353 crore of ₹357 crore), per Entrackr — supplements and ancillary services are a rounding error next to the core test business.
• Non-operating income: a smaller layer of interest income on cash balances — ₹5 crore in FY26 — takes total income above operating revenue, per Entrackr’s FY26 review.
• Largest cost line: employee benefits, which stood at ₹134 crore in FY26 (36.8% of total expenditure), reflecting the labour-heavy nature of running a phlebotomist and lab-technician workforce at national scale.
• Cost the company chose to cut: advertising spend fell from ₹103 crore in FY23 to ₹39–44 crore in FY24 and FY25 — a roughly 60% reduction — even as revenue kept growing, per Entrackr’s FY24 and FY25 filings analysis.
• The part people get wrong: the “free home collection” pitch makes Healthians sound like a thin booking layer sitting on top of other people’s labs. In fact its cost structure — heavy employee costs, its own lab network, its own logistics for sample pickup — looks like an operationally heavy service business, not a software marketplace; margin comes from tightening that cost base per test, not from a take rate on volume.
• Where the margin actually turned: EBITDA margin moved from around negative 61.4% in FY23 to positive 12.2% in FY25 and a thinner positive 2.2% in FY26 even as revenue grew — evidence that scale alone did not fix margins; cost discipline on advertising and staffing did the heavier lifting, per Entrackr’s year-by-year filings review.

The numbers

Figures for FY23 to FY26 are as reported by Entrackr from Healthians’ financial statements filed with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. Note a discrepancy: in January 2026 commentary carried by The Tribune, Healthians’ own leadership cited FY24 and FY25 losses of ₹75 crore and ₹35 crore respectively — both markedly higher than the ₹45 crore and ₹5 crore figures Entrackr reported from the MCA filings for the same years. This piece uses the MCA-filing-based figures throughout, in line with the general practice of preferring audited filings over subsequent company commentary, and flags the gap here rather than silently picking one.

Where the money comes from

• Product mix is almost entirely one product: lab-testing revenue was 99% of operating revenue in FY24 and again in FY26, per Entrackr — despite years of marketing spend on broader wellness positioning, the business is still, financially, a pathology-testing company.
• Marketing-led customer acquisition, then a pullback: advertising expenditure of ₹103 crore in FY23 (against ₹224 crore of revenue that year) shows a company buying growth aggressively; the subsequent cut to roughly ₹39-44 crore a year while revenue kept rising is the clearest sign of a strategy shift toward organic and repeat demand, per Entrackr’s filings review.
• Interest income as a small buffer: ₹5 crore of interest income in FY26 on the company’s cash and current assets (₹112.5 crore at FY26-end) shows a business now sitting on enough of a balance sheet cushion to earn something from it, rather than burning cash reserves outright, per Entrackr.
• The surprise: for a company whose public image rests on app convenience and “free home collection,” the FY26 filings show a business whose economics are still won or lost in the lab and on the payroll line — in employee costs and material costs, not in software margins.

The risks

• A decade of losses does not disappear in one profitable year: even after FY26’s ₹5.4 crore profit, Healthians carried accumulated losses of ₹976 crore on its books, per Entrackr — a single positive year needs to repeat several times before the balance sheet reflects a durably profitable company, and thin margins (2.2% EBITDA margin in FY26) leave little room for a bad year.
• Regulatory and accreditation risk in a compliance-heavy category: the October 2021 episode, in which a complaint alleged unlicensed COVID-19 testing before Gurugram Police confirmed to the Delhi High Court that Healthians’ labs held ICMR and NABL accreditation, is a reminder that a diagnostics company’s licence to operate rests on continuous compliance across every lab and every city it serves, per Hindustan Times’ reporting — a single lapse, real or alleged, becomes a public dispute quickly.
• Leadership transition risk at a fragile moment: the CEO handover from founder Deepak Sahni to Nishant Singhal in July 2025, and Sahni’s reported sale of a substantial stake to WestBridge Capital, occurred just as the company approached its first-ever profitable year, per The Tribune’s reporting — execution risk is highest when strategy, incentives and reporting lines change at the same time a business is trying to hold onto newly positive margins.

The takeaway

Healthians spent roughly eleven years, more than one founder-generation of leadership, and by its own investors’ account somewhere between $80 million and $100-plus million to arrive at a single-digit-crore annual profit. None of that is a knock on the idea — preventive, at-home diagnostics is a real behaviour change, and the company says it has reached millions of Indian households with it. It is a reminder that physical service businesses, ones with phlebotomists, vans, laboratories and payroll rather than just servers, earn durability slowly. Software margins compound the moment a product works; lab margins compound only after years of grinding down cost per test, cutting acquisition spend, and getting the operating model boring enough to be repeatable. The moment that mattered most for Healthians was not a funding round or a valuation headline; it was the year unit economics — cost per rupee of revenue — finally crossed below one.

Frequently asked questions

What does Healthians do?

Healthians is an Indian at-home diagnostics company. It sends phlebotomists to customers’ homes or offices to collect blood and other samples, processes them in its own laboratories, and delivers digital reports, typically within a day, alongside full-body checkup packages and wellness add-ons.

Who founded Healthians and when?

Deepak Sahni founded Healthians in 2015 in Gurugram, after selling two earlier businesses — a computer hardware venture and a web-services company, SWT Services — for a combined ₹5 crore in 2014. Company records also list Anuj Mittal and Shruti Gupta as co-founders.

How much funding has Healthians raised and who are its investors?

Estimates vary by source and date: Entrackr put cumulative funding at $22.8 million as of June 2021; Tracxn counted $80.1 million across 11 rounds by 2026; and company leadership told The Tribune in January 2026 that Healthians had raised “over $100 million.” Key backers across rounds include Yuvraj Singh’s YouWeCan Ventures, BeeNext, DG Incubation and DG Daiwa Ventures, and WestBridge Capital, which led its 2022 Series C at a reported $300 million valuation and remains its anchor investor.

Is Healthians profitable?

Yes, for the first time in FY26 (year ended March 2026), when it reported a net profit of ₹5.4 crore on revenue of ₹357 crore, per Entrackr’s review of its financial filings. It still carried accumulated losses of ₹976 crore from prior years on its balance sheet in the same period.

Who runs Healthians now?

Nishant Singhal has been CEO and a board member since July 2025. He was previously Healthians’ chief operating officer from May 2020 to July 2023 and an early angel backer through YouWeCan Ventures. Founder Deepak Sahni has since sold down his stake and stepped back from an executive role, according to reporting carried by The Tribune.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Healthians posts Rs 224 Cr revenue and Rs 184 Cr loss in FY23,” March 2024
• Entrackr, “Healthians achieves EBITDA breakeven with Rs 250 Cr income in FY24,” November 2024
• Entrackr, “Healthians posts Rs 263 Cr revenue in FY25; nears breakeven,” 2025
• Entrackr, “Healthians turns profitable in FY26; revenue jumps 37%,” 2026
• Inc42, “Exclusive: Healthians To Raise $54 Mn In Funding From WestBridge, Trifecta,” 3 January 2022
• Wikipedia, “Healthians,” accessed September 2026 (citing VCCircle, 18 November 2019, on the Series B round; and Entrackr, 18 June 2021, on cumulative funding of $22.8 million)
• Hindustan Times, “‘Healthians’ lab has ICMR, NABL accreditation; Gurugram Police to Delhi HC,” 26 October 2021
• The Tribune, “Westbridge doubles down on Healthians as one of its largest long term bets in Healthtech Space,” 20-21 January 2026
• The Tribune, “Healthians Appoints Nishant Singhal as New CEO to Lead Next Phase of Growth,” July 2025
• The Weekend Leader, “Healthians Founder Deepak Sahni: From College Dropout to Health Lab Mogul with Rs 240 Crore Turnover”
• Business Upturn, “Nishant Singhal: Visionary Entrepreneur and CEO Driving Healthians’ Mission to Revolutionize At-Home Diagnostics in India”
• Tracxn, “Healthians — Funding Rounds & List of Investors,” accessed September 2026

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