Zoctr, a growing startup that is trying to unite major Indian cities under the umbrella of home health, has announced its latest round of pre-Series A funding.
Zoctr has received an undisclosed sum from the Times Group – the third round of funding in the past nine months – that is expected to help the company expand its brand through print, Internet, and radio ads that will alert customers to this conglomeration of home health. Under the company brand, customers will be able to find telehealth and remote patient monitoring that can best assist post-acute, chronic, and terminal patients who are directly out of surgery or may have cancer or other serious maladies.
Although the company is based in Mumbai, it has a team of 100 employees that work in a number of cities throughout India, including Ahmedabad, Delhi, Kolkata, and Pune. With those employees, it hopes to make its wide-reaching vision a reality, CEO Nidhi Saxena explains:
“Zoctr’s aspiration is to touch 500,000+ Indians and be amongst the top five most recognized healthcare brands in India in the next five years. The Times Group’s impeccable credibility, outreach, and media mix coupled with the timing of the deal shall help Zoctr create a high impact launch and reach out to a Pan-India audience thereby enabling strong brand awareness and rapid adoption of home healthcare services by consumers.”
In the end, Zoctr says, it wants to reach 18 cities in India, which will allow it to assist healthcare for about 45 percent of the country’s population. In addition to a strong advertising campaign, it is bringing a strong backend that will accept and feed information to and from a mobile app that should be available to both consumers and practitioners.
This will require more than just a few rounds of preliminary funding. In order to develop its medical expertise and have enough staff on hand to manage a sizable percentage of India’s residents, Zoctr indicates that it will need further investment; it expects to raise $10 million in Series A funding in the next six months. Given its lofty ambitions, the company will need to demonstrate what it can do with this funding from the Times Group. If it impresses a number of other investors, a cool $10 million could be on the doorstep and ready to make the technological side of this venture more of a reality.
Edited by
Kyle Piscioniere
