Among the crop of products and services catering to the wishes of younger India stand out startups like Chennai-primarily based Athulya Assisted Living serving senior citizens, who may additionally shape a niche target market now, but no longer for lengthy. India, which is home to at least one. Three billion people are considered a younger US, with nearly half its population under 25. However, this is set to change if authorities’ projections and the current Economic Survey are to move through. By 2050, the use of a is estimated to host almost 340 million people above 60 — more than the USA’s contemporary populace! With low healthcare penetration — one bed for 1,000 sufferers — India needs elevated investment and useful resource allocation in senior care. Karthik Ramakrishnan’s Athulya Assisted Living, a geriatric care startup set up in Mylapore, Chennai, in 2017, aims to deal with this want. Functioning as a “premium assisted dwelling domestic” with a crew of professional healthcare specialists to attend to customers’ every need, the young startup also has a web presence.
Not a nursing home
Athulya is an assisted living center that focuses on people living overseas and busy professionals who want experts to care for their parents. From assisted beds to high-quit ECG machines and a doctor on call 24/7, Athulya does all its bookings online, the verifications over a smartphone name, and bodily verifications as well. The startup charges its customers on a condominium (monthly) basis.
“It was not easy to start up in India because there are vintage-age houses that take in humans and are not connecting the element of healthcare. Older humans need no longer only a network but also the availability of doctors and nurses, and they need to live within the region of a medical institution,” says Karthik N Ramakrishnan, founder of Athulya Assisted Living.
Karthik started as a skilled doctor and is a hospital control expert with over 10 years of administrative and medical experience. He served as the nearby lead and fellow in overall performance development for main fitness systems inside the US, including Dignity Health, Prime Healthcare Services, and Kaiser Permanente.
He also acts as a major healthcare consultant for Sri City, one of India’s largest commercial enterprise towns, and is the marketing consultant to the SRM Institute of Medical Sciences (SIMS).
End-to-quit offerings
Karthik bootstrapped the startup by pumping Rs 2 crore into Athulya. He does now not desire to disclose his revenue but says he is scaling up. However, teething challenges existed, particularly while convincing the kids of the startup’s audience. “It became slow going as human beings have biases toward senior care. Children abroad don’t recognize that parents may be cared for using experts. But, after 3 months, the first customer got here to us from Singapore,” says Karthik, including the couple dropping their mother off at their assisted residing center. The subsequent whiff of fulfillment in 2018 led Karthik to shop in the two extra suburbs of Chennai – Arambakkam and Perungudi. Today, the startup has more than 50 people staying with them. The organization plans to create apps in Destiny where customers can look at their dad and mom dwelling in these assisted houses.
It connects its guests to hospitals by constantly checking their vitals via IoT gadgets and passing that information into the cloud. “The first step is to provide assisted care, and as we scale, we can upload extra generation,” says Karthik. Athulya has also released an emblem known as Healthabove60 to offer help and expertise at the steps of individuals, which means senior citizens can get domestic homes instead of living in an assisted living center.
Healthabove60 affords visits using docs, home care nursing assistants, home care attendants, physiotherapist visits, domestic blood series, medication shipping, clinical counseling, ambulance offerings, dental offerings, medical devices, and dialysis. The fee, in step with the year, could move from $20,000 to $ hundred 000 to assist the senior citizen. “We are constructing a network too. A gift, I even have plans to amplify from 50 to one hundred beds, after which to 500 beds in 18 months and to 5,000 in 5 years,” says Karthik. The market is massive; regrettably, the supply of the most effective three hundred 000 gadgets is consistent with JLL, the real estate consulting firm. There is a want for fast growth.
