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The emergency response company Stanplushas raised $20 million in Series A funding  from marquee investors, including HealthQuad, Kalaari Capital, and HealthX Capital Singapore.

Pegasus (Hiranandani family office), Sandeep Singhal (Avaana), and Prashant Malik also participated alongside a clutch of angel investors.Veda Corporate Advisors were exclusive advisors to StanPlus and its shareholders.

The funding will be used to scale up operations and reduce ambulance ETA from 15 minutes to eight minutes.

Prabhdeep Singh, Founder and CEO, StanPlus, said in a conversation with YS, “Our aim to raise such a large round of funding is to create large-scale impact. We will be building deep technology, hiring people, and scaling geographically. The healthcare market today is significantly fragmented.

“While we live in a world of quick commerce with essentials getting delivered in 10 minutes, ambulance services and tele-consultancy services still aren’t available within 10 minutes. We want to scale across 15 cities, and bring out the best in people, tech, ambulances, and air ambulances to meet a promise of eight minutes.”

This is the largest Series A funding raised in the healthcare sector. Overall, the capital infusion will be leveraged to scale up StanPlus’s operations to 500 hospitals, and launch its flagship Red Ambulance brand in 15 cities from the current five.

The end goal is to bring the ambulance ETAs down to eight minutes from the current 15 minutes (for StanPlus) and less than 40 minutes on average by other ambulance service providers. Its hybrid fleet model allows for a quick scale-up while maintaining world-class clinical standards.

“We cannot build a tech platform without building or looking at the core infrastructure in a country like India. We are not just an aggregation platform; we have a rapid emergency response layer that works on first principles that ensures that people get the right service, backed with the right layer of technology,” said Prabhdeep, who founded StanPlus in 2016 along with Antoine Poirson and Jose Leon.

Tech-enabled emergency response

Charles-Antoine Janssen, CIO, HealthQuad Capital, said, “With an inadequate and inefficient medical emergency response system (ERS) currently in India, our case fatality rates for road traffic accidents, cardiac, and neurological emergencies remain significantly higher than those of the developed world, largely due to the lack of efficient retrieval systems during the “Golden Hour”.

“StanPlus has developed an innovative, tech-enabled platform to effectively address emergency responses and manage timely ambulance dispatches through its fleet of Red Ambulances, thus addressing the above deficiencies. We believe that this model could be rapidly scaled up across the country and has the potential to save millions of lives in the coming years. We are excited to back the company and look forward to supporting its objective of building quality ERS across India.”

StanPlus’ goal is to organise India’s emergency medical response (EMR) with the use of technology, trained personnel, and a multi-city fleet of ambulances for both critical and non-critical care.

It standardises hospital ambulances, private operators, government-run services, and mom-and-pop ambulances through a unified tech platform. It also runs its own fleet of Advanced Life Support (ALS) ambulances.

“Our ambulances are present in hospitals across different parts of the country, which makes us well equipped to reach any emergency situation within the eight minutes we have planned. We have partnered with hospitals across the five cities we are operational in to manage their medical response systems, and patient transportation needs. We now have to replicate this model in 15 cities,” Prabhdeep said.

Full-stack medical assistance

The emergency response industry in India is valued at $15 billion. Addressing the gaps in the highly fragmented market, StanPlus has created the Red Health platform to allow large hospitals, employers, health-apps, wearables, cars, and any other ecosystem player to enable plug-and-play medical response.

StanPlus has top-of-the-line equipment and trained paramedics on board. Its doctors and drivers are trained to handle varying kinds of patient needs, from accident/burn victims and cardiac emergencies to surgery patients, and so on.

The full-stack medical assistance company takes care of everything, from “software and hardware to the telephony systems, drivers, and paramedics to make our network completely seamless”.

“We are also creating our own training modules for clinical and non-clinical staff,” Prabhdeep said.

The startup also is working with corporates and enterprises to aid in the emergency response for their employees.

Vani Kola, MD, Kalaari Capital, said, “Over the last two years, we have witnessed first-hand the importance of efficient healthcare infrastructure in India. While there has been a lot of buzz around quick commerce and 15-minute grocery delivery, StanPlus is one company making 15-minute emergency healthcare services a reality in India. We at Kalaari are humbled and proud to be a part of StanPlus very early on and are excited about the disruption [it] will bring to emergency healthcare.”