JOIN USHealth seekers, who search the internet for information on health-related topics, end up visiting many sites, mostly international health portals, as there are not many India-centric portals.
Sensing the need and realising a lot of demand and necessity for a portal, three entrepreneurs — Bikram Barman, Pankaj Pandey and Dr Geethanjali, founded Modasta a year ago.
Modasta went live in April this year, and since then, has been witnessing huge traffic, both on its portal and app.
“In just four months, we have 1.5 million users, and we hope to cross two million this month and five million visitors a month by the end of this year,” said COO of Modasta Pankaj Pandey.
While its core business is to provide health-related information curated by doctors for Indian health seekers, it is also looking at telemedicine and booking appointments.
“We are in talks with many doctors. At present, 500 doctors are on board, and we will be launching this (appointment bookings and video chat) within a month’s time,” said Barman, who is the CEO of Modasta, adding that the startup’s app has more features and one can read the articles offline after downloading them.
Talking about health-related information, Pandey said that people generally visit WebMD or Mayo Clinic, and articles there are more for the West and not for Indians. “Our mission is to use a digital platform to provide value to consumers. People in tier II or tier III cities can look at our app, read articles and get an appointment with doctors, and even video-chat with him/her,” said Barman.
South Indian languages
Apart from English and Hindi, Modasta is available in all South Indian languages too. “For example, if you take 100 people, and only 10 to 15 can read English, what about the rest? We want to cater to everyone,” said Pandey, adding that they want to establish leadership in this space.
Modasta raised $1.5 million from a consortium of Mauritius-based HNI investors. “We are looking to raise funds as it helps us grow faster, and we can also engage with more users,” said Pandey.