Startup Deep Dive : Pristyn Care — a surgery unicorn that now earns almost as much from smartwatches

Pristyn Care lost ₹381 crore in FY24 on ₹601 crore (~$62.6 million) of revenue — a fairly ordinary healthtech burn story. What is not ordinary is where roughly four in every ten of those revenue rupees came from: not surgery, but smartwatches, massage guns and weighing scales sold under a fitness brand the company built almost as a side hustle.

That contradiction sits at the centre of Pristyn Care’s story. A company that set out to fix how India gets operated on for piles, hernias and gallstones now earns nearly as much from selling gadgets as it does from selling care. Whether that is diversification or drift depends on who you ask — and on what happens to the surgery business once the marketing spend that built it keeps shrinking.

Quick facts

What they do

Pristyn Care sells scheduled, minimally invasive surgery to patients who would otherwise navigate India’s fragmented hospital system on their own — people who need a hernia repaired, piles treated, a gallbladder removed, a hair transplant or a gynaecological procedure done, and who want one phone call to handle the doctor, the hospital bed, the paperwork and the insurance claim. The company does not own hospitals. It signs partnership agreements with hospitals and day-care surgical centres, staffs them with its own salaried and empanelled surgeons, and sells the patient a single bundled experience: consultation, diagnosis, procedure and follow-up, marketed almost entirely through digital advertising and call-centre counselling. Alongside that core business sits beatXp, a wellness and fitness-gadget label Pristyn Care built from scratch and now sells through e-commerce and retail, unconnected to any hospital visit.

The origin

The founding trio knew each other long before the company existed. Harsimarbir Singh and Vaibhav Kapoor grew up together in Ludhiana, went to the same schools, and split paths when Singh chose engineering and Kapoor chose medicine. Kapoor married Garima Sawhney, a fellow doctor he trained alongside during his MBBS. Both Kapoor and Sawhney spent years operating inside India’s traditional hospital system as practising surgeons, and it was that vantage point — not a market study — that supplied the founding insight. They watched patients get quoted wildly different prices for the same procedure at different hospitals, wait weeks for a surgery slot, get treated in facilities with inconsistent hygiene standards, and then get discharged with no one accountable for what happened after.

The original plan, hatched over what the founders have described as late-night conversations, was modest: Singh would bring in patients and Kapoor and Sawhney would operate on them, run as a single clinic. It changed fast. The three mapped roughly twenty friction points across a patient’s surgical journey and rebuilt the plan around a bigger question — could a single platform standardise elective surgery, at scale, across a country where hospital quality and pricing vary wildly by city and by chain. Pristyn Care was incorporated in August 2018 on that premise.

The struggle years

The first serious test arrived in March 2020, when the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare’s Covid-19 directives forced hospitals nationwide to postpone elective procedures. For a company whose entire model depends on scheduled, non-emergency surgery, a blanket ban on exactly that category of care was close to an existential threat. Pristyn Care did not resume full operations until late May 2020, when it restarted surgical treatments across 17 cities — seven tier-1 and ten tier-2 — and reported a 200% jump in patient queries for general surgery and urology procedures as the backlog cleared, according to a company release carried by PR Newswire.

The second test was self-inflicted. In June 2022, Pristyn Care acquired telemedicine platform Lybrate for a reported $20–30 million. Within roughly two years the company had concluded the acquisition added little value and began winding the platform down — a costly detour during a period when capital discipline mattered more than ever. That period also brought the company’s first real workforce contraction: around 300 employees, more than 15% of a headcount that stood above 2,000, were let go in 2022 across sales, administrative and category teams, followed by a further 45 dismissals in March 2023. By late 2023 and into 2024, reports of senior executive exits and cash-flow strain were circulating alongside a fresh round of cuts — 120 employees in March 2024, roughly 7% of staff — as the company pushed to show a credible path to profitability ahead of any public listing.

The turning point

The clearest inflection point is financial rather than operational: the eight months between April and December 2021. Pristyn Care raised $53 million in a Series D round led by Tiger Global in April 2021, valuing the company at just over $550 million. By December 2021, it closed a $96 million Series E — backed by Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, Hummingbird Ventures, Epiq Capital and Trifecta Capital, alongside angel investors including Kunal Shah and Deepinder Goyal — at a valuation of $1.4 billion, crossing the unicorn threshold and becoming India’s fourth healthtech unicorn. Entrackr reported that the company’s per-share price rose 136% between the two rounds. That compression of a near-tripling in valuation into under a year, arriving barely twelve months after Covid had shut down the company’s entire addressable procedure list, is the moment Pristyn Care’s growth story and its capital story diverged from most of its healthtech peers.

The money behind it

Pristyn Care has raised roughly $180–191 million across seven priced rounds since 2019, according to Value For Startups and Digital Health News, starting with a $13 million Series A led by Sequoia Capital India in mid-2019. Three backers shaped the company’s trajectory most visibly. Sequoia Capital India (now Peak XV Partners) came in earliest, at Series A, and stayed through every subsequent round, anchoring the company’s credibility with later-stage global investors. Tiger Global arrived at Series D in April 2021 and, per Entrackr, wrote the largest cheques in both the Series D and Series E rounds, underwriting the valuation run that produced unicorn status. Epiq Capital participated from Series C through Series E, one of a smaller set of investors that stayed in for the healthtech thesis specifically rather than as a late, opportunistic entrant.

The most recent disclosed round tells a different story to the 2021 sprint. In July 2025, Pristyn Care raised a small $4 million tranche of Series E1 compulsorily convertible preference shares from existing investors Peak XV Partners and Hummingbird Ventures, at the same share price as the prior round — a flat $1.4 billion valuation, as reported by both Digital Health News and Value For Startups. The company was earlier reported to be in talks for a larger $50–100 million raise to close in the first half of 2025; what actually landed was a small, insider-only bridge, earmarked specifically to fund new owned hospitals rather than the marketing-led growth of earlier years.

How it makes money

The surgery business runs on an asset-light spread. Pristyn Care does not build or own hospital infrastructure; it leases operating-theatre time and beds from partner hospitals and day-care centres — more than 800 of them, per Value For Startups — and staffs procedures with its own roster of 400-plus salaried and empanelled surgeons. It quotes the patient a single bundled price for the procedure. Out of that price, it pays the partner hospital a facility-usage fee and pays its surgeons a professional fee; what remains, after the cost of acquiring that patient in the first place, is the company’s margin. Because Pristyn Care controls patient demand through its own digital marketing and call-centre counselling — rather than relying on walk-ins — it can negotiate bulk facility rates with hospitals that an individual surgeon could not.

The part people consistently get wrong is assuming this is a pure services margin business. It is not: customer acquisition is the single largest cost line after the surgery and product costs themselves. In FY23, advertising and sales promotion was ₹220 crore, a quarter of total expenditure; in FY24 that fell 21% to ₹182.5 crore as the company deliberately throttled marketing to protect its loss line — a trade-off between growth and burn that any aggregator model eventually has to make once venture funding tightens. Layered on top is beatXp, the D2C wellness brand, which runs on ordinary e-commerce economics — cost of goods, logistics, platform fees — entirely separate from the surgical unit economics, and which by FY24 had grown to be nearly as large a share of revenue as the core business it was originally meant to complement.

The numbers

Pristyn Care’s revenue has nearly doubled over three years while its losses have grown more slowly and then plateaued — a trajectory the company points to as evidence its unit economics are improving, even though it remains loss-making by a wide margin. Figures below are standalone, as reported in regulatory filings reviewed by Entrackr and Inc42.

Two things stand out. First, the loss essentially stopped growing between FY23 and FY24 even as revenue rose by a third — total expenditure grew a more modest 15.6% to ₹1,013.8 crore, driven by lower advertising and flat employee costs. Second, the company’s own disclosed efficiency ratio — how much it spends to earn one rupee — improved from ₹1.94 in FY23 to ₹1.69 in FY24, still well above breakeven but moving in the right direction, per Entrackr’s review of the filings.

Where the money comes from

By FY24, Pristyn Care’s revenue was split roughly 55% healthcare services (the surgical business, around ₹332–346 crore depending on how non-operating income is allocated) and about 42% products — almost entirely beatXp, which grew 2.5 times year-on-year to ₹267 crore, according to Entrackr’s FY24 filing review. That is the surprise in the business: a company built to fix elective surgery now derives a share of revenue from wellness gadgets that rivals its core medical business, and beatXp had reportedly turned EBITDA-positive as early as January 2023, well ahead of the parent surgical business. Geographically, the surgical arm operates in more than 40 Indian cities through over 800 partner hospitals and 100-plus owned clinics, with a brief international foray into Bangladesh from 2022; no city- or state-level revenue split is publicly disclosed, so the geographic concentration within India’s metro and tier-2 markets cannot be quantified precisely from public filings.

The risks

Three risks recur across independent reporting and the company’s own disclosed numbers. The first is clinical and reputational: an investigation by The Morning Context documented patient complaints of unnecessary surgeries and rushed, five-minute consultations conducted over phone photographs rather than in-person examination, and raised the concern that a model paying surgeons and counsellors on conversion volume creates an incentive to recommend surgery over conservative treatment. Multiple patient reviews on Trustpilot and consumer-complaint forums echo poor pre-surgery diagnosis and fragmented accountability between coordinators, surgeons and partner hospitals — a structural consequence of the multi-party model itself, not an isolated incident.

The second is the unit-economics dependency on marketing spend. Because Pristyn Care does not own the hospitals or clinics where surgery happens, its only durable lever over demand is digital advertising and outbound counselling; cutting that spend, as it did by 21% in FY24 to protect its loss line, risks slowing the very procedure volume the model needs to cover its fixed surgeon and facility commitments. The third is capital availability: the company’s own target raise of $50–100 million for 2025 shrank to a $4 million insider-only bridge at a flat valuation, a sign that new external capital at a higher valuation was not readily available, leaving an IPO planned for around FY28 as the remaining path to a large capital event.

The takeaway

An aggregator that doesn’t own the assets it depends on has to win on demand and trust, not on infrastructure — and both of those are harder to defend than a hospital building. Pristyn Care proved it could manufacture demand fast enough to become a unicorn within three years of founding; it has spent the years since discovering that manufacturing trust in a clinical setting, at the pace demand requires, is the much slower and more expensive problem, and one that a bundled sale of a smartwatch cannot solve for a business built around a scalpel.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Pristyn Care and when?

Pristyn Care was founded in August 2018 by Harsimarbir Singh, along with practising surgeons Dr Vaibhav Kapoor and Dr Garima Sawhney, in Gurugram.

What is Pristyn Care’s current valuation?

Pristyn Care is reported to be valued at $1.4 billion, a figure that has stayed flat since its December 2021 unicorn round and through its most recent July 2025 funding tranche, as per Digital Health News and Value For Startups.

Is Pristyn Care profitable?

No. It reported a net loss of ₹381 crore in FY24 on ₹601 crore of operating revenue, roughly unchanged from a ₹382.5 crore loss in FY23, according to Inc42’s review of regulatory filings. Management has stated a target of EBITDA positivity by FY26.

Does Pristyn Care own hospitals?

Historically it operated an asset-light model, leasing operating-theatre time and beds from more than 800 partner hospitals rather than owning them. Since 2025 it has begun selectively opening a small number of owned hospitals, funded partly by its July 2025 bridge round.

Is Pristyn Care planning an IPO?

The company has stated an ambition to list by around FY28, contingent on reaching EBITDA positivity and reducing its reliance on external growth capital, according to Startup Story Media and other trade reporting.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Pristyn Care turns unicorn after new round”, December 2021
• Inc42, “Healthtech Startup Pristyn Care Enters Unicorn Club After $96 Mn Funding”, December 2021
• Wikipedia, “Pristyn Care”, accessed September 2026
• Entrackr, “Pristyn Care’s revenue grows 45% to Rs 453 Cr in FY23”, December 2023
• Inc42, “Pristyn Care’s FY23 Revenue Inches Closer To INR 500 Cr Mark, Loss Jumps To INR 383 Cr”, December 2023
• Entrackr, “Pristyn Care revenue grows 33% to Rs 601 Cr in FY24”, 2024
• Inc42, “Pristyn Care’s Loss Flat At INR 381 Cr In FY24”, 2024
• Inc42, “Exclusive: Pristyn Care Lays Off 120 Employees, Eyes Profitability By FY25”, March 2024
• BW People, “Healthtech Unicorn Pristyn Care Lays Off 300 Employees”, 2022
• The Morning Context, “Pristyn Care gets accused of medical negligence”, accessed September 2026
• PR Newswire India, “Pristyn Care Resumes Surgical Operations Across 17 Cities…”, May 2020
• Digital Health News, “Pristyn Care Raises $4 Mn to Expand In-House Hospitals, Eyes Larger Round”, October 2025
• Digital Health News, “Pristyn Care Faces Executive Exits, Cost-Cutting Amid Financial Struggles”, accessed September 2026
• Value For Startups, “Pristyn Care Investor Report 2026”, accessed September 2026
• Startup Story Media, “Insights: Pristyn Care Eyes Fresh Funding, Aims for IPO by 2028”, accessed September 2026

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