Startup Deep Dive : Redcliffe Labs — how a genetic-testing bet became a Rs 419 crore diagnostics chain still losing money

Redcliffe Labs processed more than 2.5 million diagnostic cases in FY25 and grew revenue 20% to Rs 419 crore ($43.6 million at $1 = Rs 96.0, 18 September 2026) — yet the company spent roughly Rs 1.6 to generate every Rs 1 of revenue as recently as FY24, according to its own regulatory filings.

That contradiction — fast, tech-enabled growth into India’s smaller cities sitting on top of years of steep losses — is the story of a diagnostics chain built first as a genetics specialist, rescued by a pandemic it did not plan for, and now racing to prove it can turn scale into profit before the next funding round runs out.

Quick facts

What they do

Redcliffe Labs runs an omnichannel diagnostics business: patients book a blood draw, scan or genetic test online or over the phone, a technician collects the sample at home or the patient walks into one of the company’s own labs, and the report is delivered digitally. The company operates through a national reference lab plus a network of city and satellite labs, with home collection layered on top — the format that separates it from older, walk-in-only pathology chains. Its customer base spans individual patients paying out of pocket, corporate wellness clients, and diagnostic referrals from doctors and hospitals across more than 220 Indian cities.

The origin

Dheeraj Jain was not new to healthcare or to building companies from scratch. He had already co-founded the hygiene brand PeeSafe and the fertility-diagnostics platform Crysta IVF, and ran an investment firm, Redcliffe Capital, before starting Redcliffe Labs in 2018 with Aditya Kandoi and Ashish Dubey. The founding insight was narrow and specific, not the broad omnichannel pitch the company makes today: India was underserved in high-end genetic and reproductive-health testing, and a company with real clinical depth in that niche could win on accuracy and turnaround time rather than price. The team set up its first lab in Delhi, built a clinical team, and put together a test menu anchored in genetic screening and maternal-health diagnostics, before taking it to market in Delhi-NCR, Hyderabad and Pune by the end of 2018.

The struggle years

Betting a young diagnostics company entirely on specialised genetic testing meant a narrow, low-volume customer base for nearly two years — the kind of runway-eating bet that many single-product diagnostics start-ups don’t survive long enough to reconsider. Reported industry accounts of the company’s early years describe 2018-2019 as a period of building expensive PCR and genomics infrastructure against a thin, slow-growing base of specialised test orders, with none of the volume that routine pathology testing would have delivered. The business model question the founders faced by 2019 was blunt: keep serving a niche that took years to educate the market on, or find a way to put that expensive lab infrastructure to broader use. Neither answer was obvious until an external shock made the decision for them.

The turning point

That shock was COVID-19. When the pandemic reached India in 2020, RT-PCR testing overnight became the country’s single largest diagnostic need, and Redcliffe already owned PCR infrastructure built for genetic testing — equipment and trained technicians that could be redirected to processing the new virus’s genetic material almost immediately, while many general pathology labs had to build that capability from scratch. The pandemic did something else too: it forced millions of Indians who had never used a diagnostics service to get their first test done at home, because stepping into a lab was suddenly unattractive. Redcliffe leaned into that shift, expanding home collection from a niche add-on into the core of how it acquired customers. The company that emerged from 2020-2021 looked structurally different from the one that went into it — an omnichannel network built for volume, not just a specialist genetics lab. That repositioning is what unlocked the institutional funding that followed: a $2 million seed round in March 2021 and a $10 million Series A just weeks later in April 2021, backed by Chiratae Ventures among others, at a pace of fundraising that a single-product genetics lab would have struggled to justify to investors a year earlier.

The money behind it

Redcliffe Labs has raised roughly $113-116 million in disclosed funding to date, with figures varying slightly by tracker (Tracxn puts it at $115 million across six rounds; Entrackr, citing the company, put cumulative funding at $113 million as of September 2024).

• Pre-seed — undisclosed amount from Smart Launch Ventures, December 2018 (Tracxn).
• Seed — $2 million, March 2021, led by LetsVenture and other angel backers (Tracxn).
• Series A — $10 million, April 2021, with Chiratae Ventures making its first investment in the round (Entrackr; corroborated by Tracxn’s investor-level data).
• Series B — $61 million, May 2022, led by LeapFrog Investments, with Schroders joining as a new backer (Entrackr, Tracxn).
• Series C — $42 million, September 2024, led by Denmark’s IFU ($20 million) with existing investor LeapFrog contributing $15 million and shareholders HealthQuad and Spark Growth Ventures also participating (Entrackr, September 2024).

Three backers stand out for what they changed. Chiratae Ventures brought the first mark of institutional-VC credibility right after the COVID pivot, unlocking the Series A. LeapFrog Investments, an impact investor focused on healthcare access in emerging markets, led the much larger Series B and doubled down in the Series C, aligning with Redcliffe’s Tier II/III expansion thesis. IFU, Denmark’s state-backed development-finance institution, led the Series C specifically to back deeper penetration into smaller cities — development capital rather than pure growth capital, which shows up in how the funds were earmarked. Tracxn estimated the company’s valuation at approximately Rs 2,260 crore (~$270 million) as of 18 September 2024, a figure the company has not itself confirmed publicly.

The company has also used the balance sheet to buy growth rather than build all of it organically: it acquired Bengaluru-based Celara Diagnostics for up to Rs 60 crore (~$7 million) in September 2024, days after closing its Series C, and had earlier acquired Kota-based Prime Sonography & Diagnostic Centre through its Medicentre business (Entrackr, September 2024).

How it makes money

The business is straightforward in structure but has been expensive to run at scale.

• Money in: patients and referring doctors pay per test or per package; diagnostic services made up over 95% of FY25 revenue, with product sales and other income under 5% (Entrackr, July 2025).
• Money out: the biggest disclosed cost lines in FY24 were laboratory test charges (up 62.2% year-on-year as volumes grew), material costs of Rs 106.31 crore, and advertising spend of Rs 65.38 crore — down 45% as the company pulled back on paid customer acquisition (Entrackr, FY24 filing analysis).
• Where the margin sits: gross margin was 70% in FY25, which the company is targeting to lift to 74-75% in FY26 — gross profit is healthy; the losses sit below the gross-margin line, in fixed lab, logistics and overhead costs that have not yet been fully absorbed by revenue growth (Entrackr, July 2025).
• The part people get wrong: a diagnostics chain with 70% gross margins sounds close to profitable, but Redcliffe’s own FY24 filings show it spent about Rs 1.6 for every Re 1 of revenue earned that year — the gap between gross margin and bottom-line economics is the entire story of why the company is still loss-making despite healthy unit pricing on each test.

The numbers

Figures below are drawn from Entrackr’s reporting on the company’s regulatory filings (FY23-FY24) and from company-stated figures for FY25, pending that year’s filed accounts.

Two things stand out. Losses fell 28% in FY24 even as the company kept growing revenue, which is unusual for an Indian diagnostics scale-up still in expansion mode. And the FY25 figures so far are company-disclosed, ahead of the formal MCA filing that produced the FY23-FY24 numbers — so the net-loss figure for FY25 should be treated as pending confirmation, not yet a filed fact (Entrackr, July 2025).

Where the money comes from

• By service line: pathological testing generated 98% of FY24 operating revenue (Rs 341.02 crore); product sales contributed Rs 2.16 crore and other operating income Rs 5.20 crore (Entrackr, FY24 filing).
• By geography: more than 70% of FY25 testing volumes came from Tier II cities and beyond, with the company reporting 2.5 million-plus diagnosed cases and over 1.8 million samples processed from smaller cities that year (Entrackr; BioVoiceNews, July 2025).
• The surprise: a company that started life chasing metro-city genetic-testing customers now earns the majority of its testing volume from smaller cities it once treated as secondary markets — the opposite of where its original 2018 go-to-market plan pointed.

The risks

• Persistent cash burn despite healthy gross margins: FY24 filings show the company spent roughly Rs 1.6 for every Re 1 of revenue, and even the improved FY25 EBITDA margin of -21% means the core operating business is still loss-making; further capital or a faster path to EBITDA breakeven (targeted for H2 FY26) is required to avoid future down-rounds (Entrackr).
• Competitive and pricing pressure: Redcliffe competes against larger, listed diagnostics chains — Dr Lal PathLabs, Metropolis Healthcare, Thyrocare and Agilus (formerly SRL) — as well as other home-collection-led players, in a market where price competition on routine tests is intense and switching costs for patients are low.
• Acquisition-integration and concentration risk: growth increasingly depends on bolt-on acquisitions (Celara Diagnostics, Prime Sonography) layered onto an aggressive organic target of 300 cities and 150 labs by FY28, while over 95% of revenue still comes from a single diagnostics-services line with limited product or geographic diversification (Entrackr, September 2024 and July 2025).

The takeaway

Redcliffe Labs’ most important pivot was not choosing home collection over walk-in labs — it was being willing to abandon a founding thesis (specialised genetic testing as the wedge) the moment the market handed it a bigger, more urgent problem to solve with the same infrastructure. The lesson generalises beyond diagnostics: a narrow technical capability built for one purpose is often more valuable as a platform for a broader one, but only if a founder is willing to let go of the original plan before the balance sheet forces the decision.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Redcliffe Labs and when?

Dheeraj Jain, Aditya Kandoi and Ashish Dubey founded Redcliffe Labs in 2018 in Noida; Jain had previously co-founded PeeSafe and Crysta IVF (company sources; Entrackr).

How much funding has Redcliffe Labs raised?

Trackers put cumulative funding at roughly $113-116 million across pre-seed, seed, Series A, B and C rounds through September 2024, with Tracxn estimating the company’s valuation at approximately Rs 2,260 crore (~$270 million) at that time — a figure not confirmed by the company itself.

Is Redcliffe Labs profitable?

Not yet on a net basis. It reported a Rs 250 crore net loss in FY24 (MCA filing) even as revenue grew, and its EBITDA margin improved to -21% in FY25 from -38% in FY24; the company has stated it expects EBITDA-positive quarters from the second half of FY26 (Entrackr).

What was the turning point for Redcliffe Labs?

The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, which let the company redeploy PCR infrastructure built for genetic testing into COVID-19 testing and pushed home sample collection from a niche feature into its core acquisition channel.

Is Redcliffe Labs planning an IPO?

There is no public evidence of a DRHP filing or listing plan as of September 2026; the company remains privately held and continues to raise venture funding.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Redcliffe Labs raises $42 Mn in Series C round”, September 2024
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Redcliffe Labs acquires Celara Diagnostics for $7 Mn”, September 2024
• Entrackr (Fintrackr), “Redcliffe Labs crosses Rs 350 Cr revenue in FY24, narrows losses significantly”, 2024
• Entrackr (Fintrackr), “Redcliffe Labs posts Rs 419 Cr revenue in FY25; narrows EBITDA losses”, July 2025
• BioVoiceNews, “Redcliffe Labs reports 20% growth with Rs 419 crore revenue in FY25”, July 2025
• CXO Digitalpulse, “Redcliffe Labs Reports ₹419 Cr Revenue in FY25, Narrows EBITDA Losses”, July 2025
• Tracxn, “Redcliffe Labs — Company Profile, Funding and Investors”, accessed September 2026
• YourStory, “Redcliffe Labs bags $42M funding to expand diagnostics in Tier II, III cities”, September 2024
• Redcliffe Labs, “About us” and “Our labs and technology” (NABL accreditation), company website, accessed September 2026

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