This Digital Health Startup Aims To Manage And Reverse Diabetes BeatO has expanded to 650,000 registered members out of which 3,00,000 are paid members being serviced across 3,000 cities in India. 65 per cent of their members are from tier-II cities and beyond, which is precisely where the burden of Diabetes is sharply rising.

While there would be few health-conscious nerds who microscopically quantify their activity and lifestyle daily, this becomes more or less a necessity to do on an ongoing basis for people when they become diabetic. To keep people engaged and motivated to do this over a long time and provide them a support system to enable them with the actions they need to take becomes crucial to driving long-term health outcomes in their lives.

When Yash Sehgal was diagnosed with type-II diabetes, he started looking for a platform that could answer all his queries and help him be in control of Diabetes for a healthier life. To his surprise, he couldn't find one.

Sehgal, who had worked and scaled his family business, and has more than 17 years of experience, and his school friend Gautam Chopra decided to start BeatO in 2015. The full-stack platform provides solutions to monitor, manage and reduce the impact of diabetes – along with other cardiometabolic conditions like blood pressure and cholesterol.

India is well known as the "diabetes capital' of the world. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the number of people with diabetes is rising rapidly in middle and low-income countries, and it is estimated that there will be around 100 million people with diabetes in India by 2030.

BeatO has expanded to 650,000 registered members out of which 3,00,000 are paid members being serviced across 3,000 cities in India. It's doing this by building a smart health management system powered by AI and IoT which provides actionable insights and real-time data-driven diabetes reduction and reversal programs via its team of expert coaches, nutritionists, and doctors.

Digital health ecosystem for chronic condition management platform BeatO's co-founder and chief executive officer Gautam Chopra told Entrepreneur India in a conversation that while they started BeatO as a simple app providing rich content for people with diabetes, they noticed the need for deeper engagement with customers on lifecycle management as they progressed. Their focus is to build a full-stack solution that touches every aspect of a diabetic's life, driving deep engagement and positive health outcomes.

"Thereafter, we realized that different people had different needs based on the seriousness of their condition, their affordability, their awareness level, and also their underlying motivation. With rich consumer insights about India and the need to build a solution at a scale that would make a big impact, we decided to build a full stack of solutions that could address these different needs across the band of monitoring, management, reduction, and reversal of diabetes and other cardiometabolic conditions with a strong backbone of technology."

In line with their goals to enable better cardiometabolic health, they have collaborated with Omron for hypertension monitoring and will soon be launching other IoT monitoring devices deeply integrated into the BeatO app ecosystem.

"Our aim is to create a digital health ecosystem which is centered on improving health outcomes of the average Indian middle-class consumer who has cardiometabolic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension. With over 20 per cent of the Indian population with at least one or more chronic diseases, it has become increasingly important to manage the prevalence and complications arising from uncontrolled chronic conditions," he stated while talking about the company's driving beliefs.

The company has raised funding from marquee investors across four funding rounds from venture capitals such as W Health Ventures, Orios Venture Partners, Leo Capital, Blume Ventures, Parkview Ventures along with Pharmeasy and angel investors including Vishal Sampat and Rajeev Chitrabhanu.

The platform has recently raised $5.7 million in a Pre-Series B round led by W Health Ventures, PharmEasy, Merisis VP, along with existing investors Orios VP and Leo Capital. With the latest funding, it has raised over $10 million over the last year across Series A and pre-Series B rounds.

The fresh funds will be utilized across two key areas: growth in subscriber base across multiple channels and geographies, and product enhancement to provide care for other cardiometabolic conditions.

After the COVID-19 outbreak in India, the company claims to have seen a significant double-digit month-on-month growth both in members and revenues. BeatO has expanded to 500,000 app installs and 300,000 paid members (adding 25,000 paid members every month). Revenues have soared 600 per cent in the last year and the establishment is clocking an annual gross revenue run-rate of INR 70 crore.

"We are beginning to work with several B2B partners across insurance, pharma, and service providers towards the same. We are also getting into more evidence-based nutrition programs enabled by real-time monitoring. In terms of geographic expansion, we will be looking actively at other Asian countries especially Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia, with large populations and unfortunately a high incidence of diabetes," Chopra commented.

The company has an omnichannel distribution which includes online distribution through its own app and website, e-commerce platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, e- pharmacies like PharmEasy and 1mg, and deep partnerships for diabetes care programs with doctors, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and also sale through offline channels such as retail pharmacies.

He believes that COVID has improved awareness about people's health and adoption of digital technology especially for chronic conditions where monitoring and management can easily be managed from home. However, BeatO has built a full-stack platform that combines cost-effective IoT hardware deeply integrated with the BeatO app ecosystem, thereby providing a complete digital ecosystem for diabetes management while ensuring real-time and proactive support for its members.

Its data-driven approach is one of its kind and presently there is no direct competition providing such a deeply integrated solution like that of BeatO.

BeatO is an ISO 13485:2016 certified company since last year.