Startup Deep Dive : Phable Care — how a chronic-care app that raised 25 million dollars vanished owing staff crores

In April 2022, PhableCare told the market it had crossed three million patients and had just raised $25 million to build India’s home for chronic-disease care, a round led by Kalaari Capital that the company reported as ₹187 crore. Sixteen months later its website was gone, its social profiles were deactivated, and a line of unpaid employees was filing complaints with the Karnataka labour department against the same founders who had celebrated that funding.

The gap between those two moments is the whole story of Phable. On paper it was a fast-growing healthtech backed by Manipal Hospitals and Kalaari Capital, serving chronic patients that India desperately needs to serve. In its filings and in the accounts of the people who worked there, it was a company earning about ₹21 crore in FY22 while losing more than seven times that, and, former employees allege, dressing up its numbers for the people who funded it. This is what the public record shows, figure by figure, and where that record simply stops.

Quick facts

What Phable did

Phable sold a single, focused idea: an app that would sit between a chronic patient and their doctor and keep the two connected between hospital visits. It targeted people with long-run conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and heart disease, where the real management happens at home over months and years rather than in a single consultation. As TechCrunch described it in February 2021, the platform integrated medical IoT devices, enabled doctor-patient communication and telemedicine consultations, and partnered with e-pharmacy services, at that point 1mg and Medlife. The app used computer vision to read results off connected devices such as blood-pressure and glucose monitors and pull the readings into a patient record automatically. In the company’s own framing at its Series B in April 2022, it was “an app-based and specialised platform for chronic disease care” offering remote consultations, insights and simplified access to medicines and tests. The customer was the patient, but the doctor was the channel: Phable grew by signing up physicians who then brought their patients onto the app.

The origin

The founding insight was personal. Sumit Sinha, the CEO, has said his father’s struggle with chronic disease is what pushed him to start the company, and that he wanted Phable to “improve the lives of millions of chronic disease patients, not only in India, but worldwide,” as recounted in a Social Starts founder interview. It was not a first-time healthcare tourist’s idea. Before Phable, Sinha spent around a decade at IQVIA, the healthcare-data and analytics firm, with earlier stints across consulting and financial services including Deloitte and ICICI Bank, per his public professional profiles. That background mattered: chronic care is fundamentally a data problem, the slow accumulation of readings, adherence and outcomes over time, and Phable’s pitch, that connected devices plus a doctor relationship could close the gap between hospital and home, sat squarely in territory Sinha had worked in for years. The company was built in Bengaluru and, according to the Inc42 company profile, was founded in 2018 by Sinha with co-founders Mukesh Bansal and Prasanth Reddy. It is worth flagging, because the name recurs in Indian startup circles, that this Mukesh Bansal is a Phable co-founder and not the Myntra and Cure.fit founder of the same name.

The struggle years

For its first stretch, Phable’s struggle was the ordinary kind: a small team trying to prove that Indian doctors and patients would actually use a chronic-care app. When TechCrunch profiled it in February 2021, the company had 72 employees and, by its own account, a little over 220,000 patients and more than 5,000 doctors. Then the pandemic turned telemedicine from a hard sell into a default, and Phable set itself aggressive targets, five million patients and 35,000 doctors by the end of 2021, according to that same report. The struggle that eventually defined the company was different, and it was financial. As Phable scaled its claimed user base, its spending ran far ahead of anything it earned. Its net loss widened from ₹30.3 crore in FY21 to ₹154.2 crore in FY22, per Inc42’s reading of its filings, against FY22 revenue of about ₹21 crore. By the time the funding environment tightened in 2022, the company had built a cost base that only fresh capital could sustain, and the fresh capital did not come. What looked like hyper-growth on the way up became an un-fundable burn on the way down, and that is when the company began to come apart.

The turning point

The turning point can be dated almost to the month: the last real money in was the $25 million Series B that closed on 11 April 2022, and by the end of that September the salaries stopped arriving on time. According to Inc42, salary delays began at the end of September 2022, first sold to staff as a “week’s delay” and then stretching to roughly a month, with October, November and December 2022 and January 2023 all delayed. The headcount collapse on either side of that line tells the story in numbers. Provident-fund records cited by Inc42 showed 918 employees credited in July 2022 and 704 by October 2022; the company’s own peak that year was reported at more than 800 in August 2022, falling to about 200 by February 2023, with 350 to 400 people laid off in tranches from October 2022. So the single event, one $25 million round that turned out to be the last, converted within six months into unpaid staff and a workforce cut by roughly three-quarters. Phable managed only a small ₹5 crore top-up between October 2022 and January 2023, per Inc42, not remotely enough to carry the cost base it had built.

The money behind it

Phable raised across several rounds over roughly three years, ending with a Series B that arrived just as the market turned. The shape of it:

• Series A, February 2021: $12 million, led by Manipal Hospitals with participation from SOSV; Entrackr reported the round as ₹90 crore led by Manipal Hospitals (TechCrunch, Entrackr).
• 2021 top-ups: ₹14 crore from Omron Ventures, plus ₹45 crore of venture debt from Stride Ventures, per Entrackr.
• Series B, 11 April 2022: ₹187 crore, reported as about $25 million, led by Kalaari Capital. New investors included Aflac Ventures, Digital Horizon and Stride Ventures; existing backers Omron Ventures, SOSV, Social Starts and Fresco Capital also took part (Entrackr, YourStory, company release via BusinessWire).
• Named backers of note: Manipal Hospitals (a hospital group anchoring the Series A and lending clinical credibility), Kalaari Capital (the Series B lead) and SOSV (an early, recurring US backer).
• Total raised: reported at $45.2 million by YourStory and at more than $51.56 million across seven rounds by Inc42 — the two independent figures do not agree, so the honest range is roughly $45 million to $52 million.
• Valuation: not publicly disclosed at any round, including the Series B.

How it made money

Phable’s model, as described across its own materials and press coverage, pulled revenue from a few connected places rather than one clean line:

• Medical devices: selling and integrating connected monitors (blood-pressure cuffs, glucometers and similar) that fed readings into the app, per TechCrunch’s February 2021 description.
• Teleconsultations: remote doctor consultations booked through the platform, the core doctor-patient loop.
• E-pharmacy and diagnostics: medicine and lab-test fulfilment through partners, with Phable positioned as the access layer; early pharmacy partners named by TechCrunch were 1mg and Medlife.
• The part people got wrong: the doctor, not the patient, was the real acquisition engine. Physicians onboarded their own patients, which made “doctors on the platform” the number that drove everything else, and, as the later allegations show, the number most worth inflating.

Phable did not publish a clean take-rate or a segment-by-segment revenue split, so how much of its ₹21 crore FY22 top line came from devices versus consults versus pharmacy is not on the public record. What the filings do show is the shape of the economics: a small revenue line against a very large cost base.

The numbers

Only two years of audited-style figures are on the public record before the company wound down, and they are enough to see the problem. Figures below are as reported by Inc42 from Phable’s regulatory filings; units are ₹ crore.

Revenue grew roughly 8.5 times off a tiny base, from ₹2.4 crore in FY21 to ₹20.9 crore in FY22, per Inc42. But the FY22 net loss of ₹154.2 crore — about $16 million converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 — was around five times the FY21 loss of ₹30.3 crore, and more than seven times the year’s revenue. FY23 numbers were never filed in the normal course, because the company suspended operations before that year closed, so the record simply ends here.

Where the money went

The more revealing split for Phable is not where revenue came from — that was never disclosed in detail — but where the cash went in the year it burned ₹154 crore. Per Inc42’s reading of the FY22 filings:

• Advertising: ₹32.2 crore in FY22, up from ₹1.4 crore in FY21 — a jump of about 22 times in a single year, spent chasing users while revenue was only ₹21 crore.
• “Miscellaneous” expenses: ₹78.7 crore, which Inc42 noted was about 45% of total expenses — the single largest bucket, and an unusually opaque one for a company that size.
• The surprise: the biggest line in the cost stack was not doctors, technology or medicines but an undifferentiated “miscellaneous” head nearly four times the company’s entire revenue, alongside an ad spend that dwarfed sales. The money was going out faster than any plausible version of the business was bringing it in.

The risks

Read backwards, Phable’s collapse maps onto a short list of concrete, mechanical risks — some structural, some specific to how this company behaved:

• Funding-dependence risk: the business could not self-fund. With FY22 revenue of ₹21 crore against a ₹154.2 crore loss, it needed continuous outside capital; when the March-2022 funding slowdown hit, the ₹5 crore it managed to raise between October 2022 and January 2023 could not cover payroll, and salaries were delayed within months (Inc42).
• Metric-integrity risk: former employees told Medical Buyer that active doctors numbered around 150 while investors were shown 10,000, that bots created fake user accounts behind a publicly claimed “10 million-plus users,” and that bulk B2B orders were booked as individual B2C sales, with retailers moving ₹1–2 crore into the company’s account to record fictitious revenue before the money was returned. These are allegations by former staff; the founders did not respond to the publication’s questions. If even partly accurate, they mean the growth story that raised the money was not real.
• Obligation risk to employees and the state: beyond delayed pay, former employees alleged that provident-fund and tax deductions were withheld from salaries but not deposited to their accounts (Medical Buyer). In April 2023, 20 employees filed complaints with the Karnataka labour commissioner against founders Sumit Sinha and Mukesh Bansal, with the labour department stating the company owed several crore to a couple of hundred people (The News Minute).

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from Phable is not that chronic-care healthtech is a bad idea — India’s need for exactly this kind of service is real, and that need is why serious investors backed it. The lesson is that a growth number is only worth what it can be verified against. Phable’s most-repeated figures, three million patients, ten thousand doctors, a claimed ten million users, were the assets it raised on, and they are precisely the figures its own former employees later said were inflated, botted or booked through circular transactions. When the metric that drives valuation is also the metric that is easiest to fake, the discipline that matters is not growth but audit: revenue you can trace to a real customer, users you can trace to a real login, doctors you can call. Phable earned about ₹21 crore in FY22 and lost ₹154.2 crore, then went off the grid in August 2023 owing its people crores in back pay. A company that had spent its energy proving those numbers, rather than presenting them, would have had a smaller story to tell investors and a truer one to survive on.

Frequently asked questions

What was Phable (PhableCare)?

Phable was a Bengaluru-based healthtech startup, founded in 2018, that ran an app for chronic-disease management. It connected patients with long-term conditions to doctors through teleconsultations, integrated medical devices such as blood-pressure and glucose monitors, medicine reminders and e-pharmacy partners.

How much money did Phable raise, and from whom?

Phable’s total raised is reported between about $45.2 million (YourStory) and more than $51.56 million (Inc42). Its Series A of $12 million (February 2021) was led by Manipal Hospitals, and its Series B of ₹187 crore, reported as about $25 million (11 April 2022), was led by Kalaari Capital, with backers including SOSV, Aflac Ventures, Stride Ventures and Omron Ventures.

Why did Phable shut down?

The company could not raise fresh funding after the market tightened in 2022 while running a heavy loss — a net loss of ₹154.2 crore in FY22 on revenue of about ₹21 crore, per Inc42. Salaries were delayed from late September 2022, staff fell from more than 800 to about 200, and the company said it suspended business citing depletion of revenue and cash flow and the fundraising slowdown.

Were there allegations of fraud at Phable?

Yes. Former employees told Medical Buyer that user and doctor numbers were inflated (around 150 active doctors versus 10,000 shown to investors, and bots creating fake users) and that bulk B2B orders and circular retailer transactions were booked as genuine revenue. The founders did not respond to the publication’s questions, and these remain allegations rather than proven findings.

What happened to Phable’s employees?

Hundreds were left unpaid. The News Minute reported that in April 2023, 20 employees filed complaints with the Karnataka labour commissioner against founders Sumit Sinha and Mukesh Bansal, with the labour department stating the company owed several crore to a couple of hundred employees; provident-fund and tax deductions were allegedly withheld but not deposited.

Sources

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

• TechCrunch — “Indian healthtech startup Phable raises $12 million…”, February 2021
• Entrackr — “Phable raises $25 Mn in Series B round”, April 2022
• YourStory — “Healthtech startup PhableCare raises $25M in Series B led by Kalaari Capital”, April 2022
• BusinessWire — “PhableCare Raises INR 187 Cr (USD 25 M) in Series B Funding” (company release), April 2022
• Inc42 — “Exclusive: Hundreds Of Layoffs, Delayed Salaries: Is Phablecare The Latest Startup To Bite The Dust?”, December 2022
• Inc42 — PhableCare company profile (funding, revenue and financials), 2026
• The News Minute — “Bengaluru-based start-up Phablecare goes off the grid, hundreds of employees unpaid”, 2023
• Medical Buyer — “How health-tech startup PhableCare scammed everyone”, 2023
• Social Starts — “Inception with Sumit Sinha, CEO of Phable” (founder interview)

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