AJVC Behind the Scenes 58: Can HealthifyMe Transform Health from India to the World?

Founders Unfiltered

Last fortnight, HealthifyMe released its campaign with Mandira Bedi, hot on the heels of its campaigns with Farhan Akhtar and Sara Ali Khan as it doubled down on celebrity marketing.

Tushar Vashisht is an Ivy League alumnus, and a Wall Street banker. When he got a chance to work with Nandan Nilekani on the UID project, he decided to come back to India. He and his roommate Matthew Cherian wanted to build a business that had a social impact, and made money too!

They decided to run an experiment - subsist for a month on what the average Indian does - just 100 rupees ($2.04) a day. The outcome - both of them lost a significant amount of weight.

People wanted a copy of the tracking journal they had maintained during this experiment. Tushar and Matthew created a business out of it.

HealthifyMe was born in 2012.

By 2014, it had 100K users on its app, grew 5X by 2015, and had a Series A round of $6M. It was well poised to gain traction in the $6B Indian wellness industry. By 2017, it had crossed 2M downloads. By 2020, it was making INR 100 Cr in ARR.

How did it leverage conversational AI (even before ChatGPT), and how will it disrupt the $5Tn global wellness market?

Read full article here: https://ajuniorvc.com/healthifyme-business-case-study-startup-tech-india-explained-weight-loss/