Startup Deep Dive : Nemocare — revenue halved even as it monitored 20,000 newborns

In the seven months to October 2023, Nemocare Wellness earned roughly ₹30 lakh — a run rate barely a third of the ₹1 crore it had booked for the whole of FY 2021-22, two years earlier. Yet the same shrinking company had, by then, already helped hospitals across five states keep watch over more than 20,000 newborns, one of the larger deployments of a wearable neonatal monitor anywhere in India.

Nemocare Raksha is a sock-like sensor that slips onto a baby’s foot and streams heart rate, breathing, oxygen levels and body temperature to a nurse’s tablet, letting one nurse watch 40 to 50 infants at once instead of two or three. The device has been used in government wards in Telangana and private NICUs in Karnataka and Maharashtra alike. What it has not yet done, on the evidence of its own public financial trail, is turn that reach into a stable revenue line — which is the real story of this company: a genuinely useful piece of hardware still hunting for a business model that matches its impact.

Quick facts

What they do

Nemocare Wellness sells a wearable called Raksha: a soft, sock-like device that wraps around a newborn’s foot and continuously reads heart rate, respiration rate, blood-oxygen saturation, body temperature, heart rate variability and perfusion index, sending the readings wirelessly to a bedside tablet and a central dashboard. The pitch is simple — most sick and premature babies in India are not born inside a neonatal intensive care unit, and most wards outside a NICU have neither the wired monitors nor the nurse-to-patient ratio to catch deterioration early. Raksha is built to let a single nurse keep an eye on 40 to 50 infants at once from one screen, rather than physically checking each cot every few hours. The customer base spans three tiers: government hospitals running CSR-funded rollouts, small and mid-sized nursing homes that pay per use, and larger private hospitals that buy the hardware outright. On top of the hardware, Nemocare is building an AI layer, developed with grant support from India’s Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), aimed at predicting neonatal sepsis before overt symptoms appear.

The origin

Manoj Sanker and Pratyusha Pareddy met in 2016 as fellows at the Centre for Healthcare Entrepreneurship, a programme run out of IIT Hyderabad that pairs engineers and designers with clinicians to find fixable problems inside Indian hospitals. Sanker, an engineer with a background in wearables, IoT and signal processing, had a personal stake in the problem: a premature birth in his own family had shown him how thin the margin for error is in the hours after a difficult delivery. Pareddy, a National Institute of Design graduate who grew up in a household where medicine was a constant dinner-table subject, brought the product and industrial-design half of the partnership. Together they spent roughly six months embedded in Telangana hospitals, watching how newborns were actually monitored outside the NICU — which, in most public wards, meant a nurse doing manual spot-checks on far more babies than she could realistically watch. That gap, not a single eureka moment, is what Raksha was designed to close: continuous, low-cost, ICU-grade monitoring for the babies who never make it into an ICU bed. A first working prototype followed within a year, tested before the founders even finished their fellowship, and the company was formally incorporated as Nemocare Wellness Private Limited on 13 July 2017.

The struggle years

What followed the first prototype was not a fast climb to market. By the founders’ and their incubator’s own account, it took about four and a half years of iterative redesign — sensor accuracy, patch comfort, battery life, cloud reliability — before Raksha reached a commercial launch in 2022. For most of that stretch, the company had no meaningful product revenue at all; it survived on a string of grants and competition prizes rather than sales, a pattern common to Indian medtech but still a genuine multi-year test of whether the idea could become a business rather than a research project. Regulatory clearance added its own drag: the founders sought India’s DCGI/CDSCO no-objection certificate for clinical studies and later set their sights on US FDA approval to unlock export markets, and as of the most recent public reporting in 2024, that US clearance was still pending, years after the pursuit began.

The sharper, more recent setback shows up in the revenue line itself. Having built to roughly ₹1 crore in sales in FY 2021-22 and reached over 20,000 monitored newborns, Nemocare’s revenue nearly halved to about ₹70 lakh in FY 2022-23, then fell further still — to around ₹30 lakh in just the first seven months of FY 2023-24, Manoj Sanker told the panel on Shark Tank India in early 2024. A company that had scaled its clinical footprint was, on its own numbers, shrinking commercially at almost the same time, a reminder that hospital and government sales cycles can move independently of — and slower than — clinical adoption.

The turning point

That contraction is the backdrop to the moment that gave Nemocare its most visible capital event: the founders’ pitch on Shark Tank India, Season 3, Episode 43, broadcast in March 2024. They walked in seeking ₹1 crore for 2.5% equity, implying a ₹40 crore valuation, at a point when the business was running at barely ₹30 lakh of revenue for the year so far. They walked out with a smaller but real deal from boAt co-founder Aman Gupta: ₹20 lakh for 0.67% equity, implying a valuation of about ₹30 crore, plus ₹80 lakh as debt at 10% interest over two years. On one side of that pitch sat a revenue run rate that had fallen roughly 70% in eighteen months; on the other, the founders projected a rebound to ₹80-90 lakh in revenue for the full FY 2023-24 and a fresh ₹1 crore of capital — split between equity and debt — to fund the AI sepsis-prediction platform that BIRAC and ICMR grants were already part-financing. Whether that projected rebound has since been confirmed in an audited filing is not publicly known; what is documented is the before-and-after of the numbers the founders themselves put on the table that day.

The money behind it

Unlike most startups profiled in this format, Nemocare’s funding history is dominated by non-dilutive grants and competition prizes rather than priced venture rounds — a reflection of how early-stage Indian medtech hardware is usually financed. The documented pieces are:

• Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Explorations grant: $100,000, awarded in 2017, funded the first working prototype (per CfHE, IIT Hyderabad)
• BIRAC WiNER 2018 award (Women in Nation-building through Entrepreneurship and Research): ₹30 lakh cash prize (per CfHE)
• BIRAC Biotechnology Ignition Grant, BIG Call 13: ₹47.2 lakh, earmarked for the AI platform that predicts sepsis risk (per CfHE)
• Axilor NH Healthcare Accelerator: ₹10.5 lakh as a compulsorily convertible debenture investment (per CfHE)
• Millennium Alliance grant (a joint programme of India’s Department of Science and Technology, USAID, FICCI and the UK government): awarded for scale-up work, amount undisclosed (per CfHE)
• Shark Tank India, Season 3 (aired March 2024): Aman Gupta — ₹20 lakh for 0.67% equity plus ₹80 lakh debt at 10% interest over two years, against an ask of ₹1 crore for 2.5% equity (₹40 crore valuation) (per Awaraj and independently corroborated deal terms reported on werisebyliftingothers.in)

Company-side reporting has put cumulative grant funding at roughly ₹6 crore in total (per 18startup.com’s company profile) — a figure noticeably larger than the sum of the individually named awards above, which suggests additional smaller or undisclosed grants (the profile also references support from Google and Qualcomm accelerator programmes, without amounts). By contrast, Tracxn’s funding database records only $38,800 to $95,900 of tracked “funding rounds” across five rounds and ten investors, a much smaller figure that likely reflects Tracxn’s narrower definition of a priced round rather than a contradiction — most of what Nemocare has raised looks to be grants and prizes rather than equity Tracxn would count as a round. No institutional venture-capital round has been publicly disclosed to date; Aman Gupta’s Shark Tank cheque is the only named equity investor outside the founders themselves.

How it makes money

Nemocare’s stated business model runs on three parallel price points, set by who is paying:

• Government hospitals: sold as a bundle — five Raksha devices, chargers, a tablet per device and a central monitoring station — typically financed through corporate social responsibility (CSR) budgets rather than hospital procurement funds
• Small and mid-sized nursing homes: a per-use model, with the hospital absorbing the device’s capital cost; patients or the facility are charged around ₹600 per baby monitored, plus roughly ₹200 each time the adhesive sensor patch is changed (patches are swapped every two to three days)
• Large private hospitals: charged the full device price outright, without the subsidised bundling used for government or CSR-linked deployments

The device itself is designed to be reused roughly 200 times before replacement, which is the economic lever that makes a ₹600-₹800 per-use fee viable rather than prohibitive. The part of this model people tend to get wrong is treating Raksha as a one-time hardware sale: in practice the founders have described it closer to a device-plus-consumable structure, where the disposable patch — not the reusable sensor pod — is the recurring line item, similar in shape to a razor-and-blades model, except that Nemocare still also sells the “razor” outright to its largest customers rather than leasing it. Looking further out, the founders have talked publicly about a plan to price future exports to Western markets at a premium and redirect roughly $5 of margin per device sold abroad back into subsidising the Indian government-hospital business — a stated ambition rather than a current, verifiable revenue stream.

The numbers

Nemocare is a private company and does not publish full profit-and-loss statements. The clearest revenue trail comes from figures the founders themselves stated on Shark Tank India in March 2024, cross-checked where possible against Registrar of Companies filings. Profit or loss figures beyond FY 2019-20 have not been independently verified and are marked accordingly rather than estimated.

Two things stand out in that trail. First, revenue roughly halved between FY22 and FY23, then fell further before the founders projected a partial recovery — a genuinely volatile top line for a company that had, by 2024, already reached over 20,000 monitored newborns. Second, the only independently sourced profitability figure available, from FY20, shows a business still well short of break-even, with a return on capital employed of -344% and a return on equity of -119% that year (Registrar of Companies filing, via Tofler) — extreme ratios that are typical of an early-stage hardware company running mostly on grant capital rather than product revenue.

Where the money comes from

• By channel: government-hospital CSR bundle sales, small-nursing-home per-use fees, and outright device sales to large private hospitals — three different price points for what is functionally the same product (per The Better India, April 2024)
• By geography: deployment began in Telangana — AIG Hospital and Kamineni Hospitals on the private side, government-run Niloufer Hospital in Hyderabad on the public side — before expanding into Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Punjab (per The Better India; NITI Aayog Frontier Tech)
• The surprise: the segment generating the company’s headline impact number — the 20,000-plus newborns monitored, mostly in resource-constrained public wards — is largely funded indirectly, through CSR money and government or philanthropic grants, rather than through direct hospital-to-Nemocare cash sales; the segments that pay full price (large private hospitals, nursing-home per-use fees) are smaller in newborn volume than the subsidised government channel. Scale and revenue, in other words, have not moved together.

The risks

• Revenue concentration and lumpy institutional sales cycles: the documented swing from about ₹1 crore (FY22) to ₹70 lakh (FY23) to a ₹30 lakh run rate (first seven months of FY24) shows how sensitive Nemocare’s top line is to the timing of a handful of hospital and CSR deals, rather than a broad, repeatable customer base (per Awaraj / Shark Tank India, March 2024)
• New debt on a thin balance sheet: the March 2024 Shark Tank deal added ₹80 lakh of debt at 10% interest over two years to a company whose paid-up capital is just ₹5 lakh and whose one independently verified profitability year (FY20) showed a net margin of -23.5% — a fixed repayment obligation layered onto a business with a small and volatile revenue base (per Tofler; Awaraj)
• Unresolved export and regulatory approval: US FDA clearance, pursued for several years as the gateway to Western markets and to the founders’ stated plan of cross-subsidising Indian sales with export margins, remained pending as of the most recent public reporting in 2024 (per The Better India; 18startup.com)

The takeaway

Nemocare’s real lesson is not about a product — the clinical case for a cheap, reusable, ICU-grade monitor in resource-poor wards is well made by the 20,000-plus babies it has already covered. It is about the mismatch that can persist between clinical usefulness and commercial traction when your most important customer segment cannot fully pay for what it needs. Building hardware for public health in a country like India often means the population that benefits most is the one least able to fund the business directly, which is why Nemocare has had to stitch together grants, prizes, a reality-television cheque and three separate pricing tiers just to keep the lights on while its clinical footprint grew. The transferable point for anyone building in this space is to treat blended financing — grants, philanthropic capital, cross-subsidised pricing and small equity checks — not as a stopgap before a “real” business model arrives, but as the business model itself, at least until public procurement or insurance catches up with what the technology can already do.

Frequently asked questions

What does Nemocare Wellness actually sell?

Its main product is Nemocare Raksha, a reusable, sock-like wearable that continuously monitors a newborn’s heart rate, breathing, oxygen saturation and temperature, sending alerts to a nurse’s tablet and a central dashboard so one nurse can watch dozens of babies at once. It is also developing an AI platform, backed by BIRAC and ICMR grants, aimed at predicting neonatal sepsis.

Who founded Nemocare, and when?

Engineer Manoj Sanker and designer Pratyusha Pareddy founded it after meeting during a 2016 fellowship at the Centre for Healthcare Entrepreneurship, IIT Hyderabad; the company was formally incorporated as Nemocare Wellness Private Limited on 13 July 2017.

How much funding has Nemocare raised, and at what valuation?

Its funding is mostly grants and prizes — including a $100,000 Gates Foundation grant, BIRAC awards worth roughly ₹77 lakh combined, and an Axilor accelerator investment of ₹10.5 lakh — with company reporting putting the cumulative grant total near ₹6 crore. Its only disclosed equity deal is from Shark Tank India in March 2024: ₹20 lakh for 0.67% equity, implying a valuation of about ₹30 crore, against an initial ask of ₹40 crore (about $4.2 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0).

Is Nemocare profitable?

There is no public evidence that it is. The one independently sourced profitability figure, for FY 2019-20, shows a net loss with a net margin of -23.5%. Revenue itself has been volatile, falling from about ₹1 crore in FY22 to roughly ₹30 lakh in the first seven months of FY24, before a founder-projected partial recovery.

Is Nemocare listed on a stock exchange?

No. It remains a private limited company; there is no public listing, IPO filing or disclosed market capitalisation.

Sources

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

• The Better India, “Engineers Raise Rs 1 Cr in Funding For Innovative ‘Socks’ That Have Saved 20,000 Newborn Lives,” April 2024
• The Better India, “NemoCare Raksha: The Indian Wearable Bringing Continuous Monitoring to Newborn Care,” 2024
• Foundation for CfHE (IIT Hyderabad), “Nemocare Wellness Pvt Ltd” startup profile, accessed September 2026
• Foundation for CfHE (IIT Hyderabad), “Congratulations to Nemo.Care Founders on Shark Tank Success!,” March 2024
• NITI Aayog Frontier Tech, “Wearable, Cloud-Connected Monitoring System Saves 20,000 High-Risk Newborn Lives,” accessed September 2026
• ITU AI for Good, “Advancing AI-powered care for newborns with NemoCare,” accessed September 2026
• Awaraj (India Shark Tank tracker), “NemoCare,” January 2025
• werisebyliftingothers.in, “Biography of Manoj Sanker: Founder & CEO of Nemocare Raksha,” December 2024
• Tofler, “Nemocare Wellness Private Limited” company financial and filings profile, accessed September 2026
• 18startup.com, “Nemo Care” company profile, accessed September 2026
• PubMed listing, “Clinical Evaluation of a Wireless Device for Monitoring Vitals in Newborn Babies,” accessed September 2026 (listing only; full study not accessed)

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