Forus Health was founded in 2010 by Shyam Vasudeva Rao and K Chandrasekhar with a mission to address health issues through innovative product design and service deployment.
In an interaction with Sujata Sangwan of BWDisrupt, K Chandrasekhar, Founder & CEO, Forus Health shares details about his venture.
1. When and why did you find this venture?Shyam and I were colleagues in Philips. We attended a session, where Dr. Arvind from Arvind Eye Hospital came and spoke about the problem of preventable blindness and its magnitude in India. Despite its life altering nature, blindness as a problem never received the media attention that diseases like Cancer and AIDS, so it was never taken as a serious threat.
The session made us privy to how a real threat blindness is, especially in India which has close to 15 million blind people of which 80% cases had been preventable. That was the first time we understood the problem and we wanted to come up with the idea. We wanted to see how we as technology people can contribute to this cause. India has only 20000 ophthalmologists for a population of 1.2 billion, the technology innovation will play a major role in helping organizations and reaching more people.
2. Share with us what’s special about this venture and how it’s different from its competitors?While there are a few big International players in this market, we were the first domestic company which started focusing on eye care devices. Our mission was to eradicate preventable blindness and not to create medical devices company. The high incidence of blindness in India is due to a combination of several issues, but mostly due to limited access to eye care facilities, high cost of treatment/surgery and lack of awareness. The objective of Forus Health is to use technology to increase access, bring down the cost of diagnosis (affordability) and raise awareness (the three A’s). The key to our solution is not just the technology, but the way in which we have designed the deployment of the product. We have found a problem with a set of limitation, if we have to address this limitation, we need to have a device which is accessible, affordable and appropriate. We work with the changing ecosystem combined with latest technology like connecting to the cloud to achieve best results.
3. How did you manage to fund this idea?Initially we put our own money and then got angel funding.
Funding-Series B- Raised $8.4M by Accel Partners, Asian Healthcare Fund, IDG Ventures India
Funding – Series A- Raised $5M by Accel Partners and IDG Ventures India
4. Tell us how the business has grown so far – how many customers, number of product offerings, profit percentages etc.Forus Health is based out of Bangalore and an entirely Made in India initiative. Our range of 3 devices is affordable, portable and compact. We are operational in 25 countries and have 1250+ installations worldwide and touched lives about 2 million plus people. We are currently scaling by adding new technologies to our portfolio and reaching out globally to people in need.
5. What is the market size and opportunity?According to the US-India Business Council, the device market in India is worth $7 billion. Only 15% people suffering from blindness in India have access to quality eye care. In the past, just 7 percent of Indians at various stages of blindness have been screened and treated, due to limited vision care access. The country’s current eye care ecosystem cannot buy enough of the expensive, legacy diagnostic devices for screening, and it cannot train a sufficient number of ophthalmologists which is where Forus Health comes in.
6. How is Forus Health's technology contributing to 'Make in India' initiative?Created own assembly set up in India. Entire R&D happens here and is shipped to other countries. There is no reverse engineering involved. We have filed about 18 patents and have got four of them granted. It’s a complete ground up product being leveraged in Make in India. We are definitely one of the cases which have made Make in India viable.
We have installed the product outside India making it both viable and acceptable even in the developed countries. Therefore we are one step ahead.
7. Tell us about your latest innovations in Health tech ecosystem and how it is helping prevent avoidable blindness in tier 2 and tier 3 cities.We have tried to make the product also to suit the needs to doctors in tier 2 and tier 3 cities. The product is rugged, affordable and usable. A lot of ophthalmologists who did fundus examination found it to be expensive, now that we are affordable it becomes easy for them to provide access to people in tier 2 and tier 3 cities. Therefore the fundus examination which did not happen before because of affordability issues is now being made possible. Therefore Forus Health is democratizing eye care in India.
