In early 2017, we at Stanford Angels came across Manuj and Rajat Garg, founders of myUpchar, an Indian language health information platform. The vision for myUpchar was to become a one-stop solution for every Indian seeking healthcare information and services in local languages. The founders had recognized the potential of the vernacular market, which was hungry for content. A WebMD in local languages for an underserved but growing population seemed like an interesting idea to our group. Hence, we invited them to our pitch session.
Its initial content on home remedies and alternative medicines seemed very authentic and well-researched, but we were not sure about the revenue model. Content firms, historically, had a difficult time generating revenue and raising larger investments. No one disputed that there was huge potential for the growing local language demographic, but there were no numbers to substantiate that this segment was monetizable. It was early days and while China had some fantastic examples of local language content companies scaling well, we did not have many in India yet. The only thing that was consumed by this segment was entertainment—movies, music and games. There was no doubt that the founding team was fantastic and were entering an interesting sector but we lacked the conviction in this model.
Today, myUpchar is India’s largest healthcare destination in terms of traffic—a whopping 12 million visitors a month! Its proprietary voice search and text-to-speech for all content, broadens reach even more. Investors like Xiaomi, Nexus, and Omidyar have now backed myUpchar and are bullish on the scope of its model. Of course, much remains to be proven in terms of scaling and revenue growth across languages and geographies. The jury is still out on their long-term survival and scale of success, but they have already created social impact by providing access to healthcare for this underserved segment. This Stanford duo has our goodwill and wishes even if we missed putting our dollars behind their belief.
