IIM Ahmedabad’s Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) has invested undisclosed amounts in Doux Dentistry, an innovative dental care startup aiming to make dental care affordable & accessible for patients at their homes under the brand name Mobident, and Zeolr, an IoT based healthcare startup that is developing solutions to aid in better management of chronic diseases by patients and availability of information to physicians for regular supervision, revision and reinforcement.
With healthcare innovation being one of CIIE’s focus areas, at present, its healthcare portfolio consists of 9 startups across medical devices, e-Health, health-education and home care. These startups have enjoyed tremendous market response and continue to receive strategic advisory and mentoring support from CIIE.
Founded by Dr. Devaiah, a dentist with over twenty years of experience, and Vivek Madappa, a serial entrepreneur, Doux Dentistry, already has presence in 4 cities - Bangalore, Pune, Mysore and Ahmedabad. Lack of awareness and the consequence of neglecting dental health among the population, are barriers that they want to address.
Mobident’s “Dental clinic in a Suitcase”, the flagship innovation of Doux Dentistry, is an asset-light model designed to address the core challenges of dental care industry such as end-user experience and high cost of dental services in India. It’s first-of-its-kind model is one tenth the cost of setting up a new clinic and provides almost all the dental diagnostics and corrective procedures that are available in a dental clinic at the comfort of our own homes, offices, schools and hospital OPD’s.
For Mobident, it is an opportunity to derive cross learnings from CIIE and propel their business to the next level through active support in fund-raise and business development.
Vivek Madappa, Co-founder, Mobident said, ”Besides providing a startup with an excellent platform like ET Power of Ideas to validate their business idea, CIIE offers a startup credibility, visibility, exposure, and excellent connections backed by investments. We are grateful to CIIE for giving us an orbit shifting platform.”
Zeolr’s flagship product, RespirON, is a comprehensive modern approach to help asthmatic and COPD patients as well as their physicians come up with the best plan for managing their conditions. It is a three tier system that includes a device and a smartphone application (compatible with Android, iOS & Windows) connected to the cloud server that helps patients and physicians consistently monitor and manage their condition.
For Zeolr, CIIE comes with the much needed hands-on support to ease the hardships and mitigate the risks that most early-stage startups experience. The Zeolr team consists of 2 passionate engineers, Roshit Gopinath and Ajay Saini, who began working on their dream venture right from college.
Roshit Gopinath, CEO, Zeolr said, “Our mission is to conceptualize the application of latest technology into healthcare services. With support from CIIE, we hope to turn this mission into reality.”
J Salim Vali, Vice President (Investments), CIIE said, “CIIE-IIMA is delighted to invest in Zeolr and Mobident. These companies have immense potential and we believe that their innovative ideas will play a key role in solving few critical healthcare issues. We believe that the combination of India's mettlesome entrepreneurs and CIIE will play a key role in solving many complex issues. ”
With Mobident, CIIE hopes to test the waters in the homecare innovation space and foray into more asset light models that address key barriers in making healthcare ubiquitous, while Zeolr is poised to set in motion CIIE’s active involvement in Healthcare IoT. As a matter of fact, CIIE’s commitment to the sector also culminated in the launch of its first Healthcare Accelerator earlier this year, and is all set to bring a new set of market driven healthcare innovations by the end of 2016.
