Ovum Hospitals Gets $5M Series A Funding from IL&FS and Norwest Venture Partners

Neonatal Care and Research Institute Pvt. Ltd. (operating under the “Ovum Hospitals” brand name), a women and child specialty hospital focused on high-end neonatal care, announced that it has raised $5 million in Series A funding from IL&FS Investment Managers and Norwest Venture Partners. Unitus Capital acted as an exclusive advisor to Ovum Hospitals on the transaction. This new round of financing will be used to set up similar facilities in and around Bangalore.

It had earlier raised funding from NationWide Primary Healthcare Services, a primary healthcare chain. A portion of this round went towards providing a partial exit to Nationwide.

The company was founded in 2011 by a team of four doctors - Drs. Adarsh Somashekar, Praveen Venkatagiri, Venkata Reddy, and Srisailesh Vitthala. The founding team has extensive UK-based training and experience and returned to India with a mission to provide standardized, high quality, affordable neonatal care. In 2014, the company extended its services to include maternal care, and Ovum Hospitals was born. Co-founder and Director of Ovum Hospitals, Dr. Praveen Venkatagiri says, “We want to bring in best practices in Maternal and Neonatal health care. In a short span of time, we were able to deliver high standard neonatal intensive care to the infants born even at 24 weeks and weighing only 500 gms at birth.”

“While gynecology services are abundant in India, demographic changes have caused an increase in high-risk deliveries and neonatal complications. Hence, there is a growing need for high quality, affordable, neonatal intensive care,” said Mark Silgardo, senior managing partner at IIML.

Ovum Hospitals has quickly expanded to four locations in Bangalore. It started with providing NICU coverage to the Milann Fertility Center and Chinmaya Mission Hospital and has now grown to a 30-bed maternal and NICU care at Banaswadi, and an IVF facility in Kalyan Nagar.

“In less than five years, Ovum has been able to build multiple neonatal hospitals using an impressive capital efficient business model,” said Mohan Kumar, executive director of Norwest Venture Partners, India. “For a mission-driven organization in a challenging environment, this is commendable.”

With state-of-the-art NICU, Ovum Hospitals strives to reduce the mortality and morbidity rate of newborns. The in-house training program ensures that the team of doctors, nurses, and support staff are always equipped with the latest clinical knowledge and technology to offer high-quality patient care, the right way.