Indian healthcare crowdfunding platform ImpactGuru.com has raised investments from Abu-Dhabi based ‘Shorooq Investments’ and from some other GCC-based angel investors. Earlier this year, ImpactGuru.com had announced raising $2 million Series co-led by Apollo Hospitals Group, Asia’s largest and most trusted healthcare group and Venture Catalysts, an Indian incubator.
Piyush Jain, Co-Founder and CEO, ImpactGuru.com said, “Impact Guru is thrilled to receive the backing of Shorooq Investments to scale crowdfunding in GCC and make healthcare affordable for all. The potential to use technology to crowdfund for help is limitless in the face of GCC’s accelerating smartphone, internet, and digital payments penetration. We look forward to providing the best and most cost-effective patient financing solution in the market today as the first mover in the GCC region.”
Founded in 2014 by Piyush Jain and Khushboo Jain, the platform makes it easy for anyone to raise funds online for their medical expenses that are not covered by insurance. Since launching, ImpactGuru.com has helped over 15,000 patients to crowdfund in the last 4 years and mobilized over $20 million across 15 countries.
Recently, DJS Racing, a Formula Student team of Dwarkadas J Sanghvi College of Engineering, Mumbai has started a fundraiser on ImpactGuru.com to design and manufacture two Formula racecar prototypes – Combustion and Electric. They have launched a campaign for an amount of 4.5 lakhs and the money raised now is close to 4 lakhs and is still ongoing. They have already built 4 cars.
Their accolades include consecutive design event winners in Formula Bharat 2017 and 2018, is the highest ranked Indian team at Formula Student Germany 2017, winners of cost and skidpad events at FB 2018, and their latest victory was the 1st rank in the cost event at the international stage of Formula Student Austria 2018.
ImpactGuru.com makes money by charging a fee between 5% to 12% of the total money raised. After raising this investment, ImpactGuru.com now plans to expand into GCC, starting from UAE. The region hosts 7 million Indian expats and more than 15% of donations on ImpactGuru.com that originate from outside of India come from GCC.
Shane Shin, Founding Managing Partner at Shorooq Investments and Mahmoud Adi, Co-Founding Partner at Shorooq Investments said, “Crowdfunding for medical bills and other personal causes has been one of the most successful and impactful business models around the world. Crowdfunding is just a natural progression of how financial technology makes our society more connected, collaborative and efficient. We are extremely excited about our investment in ImpactGuru.com and are already in advanced discussions to pilot this disruptive business across the GCC region.
The startup is looking to partner with private hospitals, clinics, health tech startups, and NGOs to accelerate its GCC entry and scale its operations. ImpactGuru.com will ensure full regulatory compliance in each jurisdiction in which it operates, said the statement.
It also notes that out of pocket private healthcare expenses in most of the GCC countries ranges between 50% to 70%.
A recent survey by an insurance company, Cigna, had concluded that close to 50% of UAE residents are concerned that they will be unable to pay for their family’s or own medical expenses, above their mandatory employee coverage, the statement added.
The governments in the region fund about 70% of all healthcare expenditure, estimated at $76 billion, per statement, which is starting to become a challenge, given lower oil prices, an ageing population, increasing prevalence of chronic diseases – particularly cancer and diabetes.
