(February 13, 2023) One day in the summer of 2016, when Vaibhav Singh and his three pals walked in to the New Delhi office of marquee tech company MapmyIndia to seek guidance from its owner Rakesh Verma, for their healthcare startup, the final semester students from BITS Pilani left a lasting impression on Verma. A BITS-Pilani alumnus himself, Verma was moved by the youngsters’ zeal to bring about a change in the country’s healthcare systems.
Less than 24 hours later, Vaibhav’s phone rang. The caller was Verma, who offered to fund their healthcare startup. Pleasantly surprised, the four friends got down to work. That was the birth of Visit Health — a holistic healthcare service platform that provides quality healthcare experience anytime, anywhere.
Vaibhav SIngh, co-founder, Visit Health
Holistic healthcare
“The wide gap in wellness and primary health care in India is what led us to start Visit Health. Today, we stand as a full-pledged primary health care service provider and have filled that gap,” smiles Vaibhav Singh, managing director and co-founder of Visit Health, in an exclusive conversation with Global Indian.
From wellness to diet plans, management, nutritionists, dermatologists, general physicians and psychologists — the fully-integrated 360-degree healthcare platform, now has the best fleet of medical experts across the country.
“We have more than a 2000 plus specialists across 20 plus verticals. We built our own network of 36,000 plus doctors who are sitting in the OPD department of hospitals or at the private clinics,” informs Vaibhav, who was named in Forbes 30 under 30, Asia, in the field of Healthcare & Science.
Born in Patna, Vaibhav wanted to become an IAS officer. “There were quite a few people in my family who were bureaucrats. So that was the passion back then,” informs Vaibhav, who completed his schooling from DAV Public School. He was strong in academics and was a die-hard cricket fan who spent hours each day playing the game.
Transformation on campus
After completing his 12th grade, he got into BITS Pilani from where he did his Master of Science (Hons) Chemistry and Bachelor in Pharmacy between 2021 and 2016. He describes it as the transformational period.
“BITS Pilani was very different from the traditional colleges. It had a flexible curriculum, and you choose your own timetable. It had everything for the overall personality development and there was a strong entrepreneurial environment in the campus,” says Vaibhav, pointing to the large number of startups coming from BITS.
The prestigious institution also has a strong alumni connect. “You will come across BITS alumni in almost every field, who will be ready to pull you up and give you guidance,” says Vaibhav, who also stood for students union elections in his second year and was elected general secretary.
Since all the activities in the college were student-run, it enabled him to have interactions with people both on and off the campus. “I was involved in raising sponsorships, inviting colleges from different cities, give presentations among other work. All these experiences played a big role in my career,” says the passionate billiards player, who was also the captain of the Pool team in college.
Foray into entrepreneurship
When he began his fourth year, he and his friends decided it was time to get down to some serious business. “We started selling ERP (enterprise resource planning) solutions to Ministry of Defence. People would charge crores for it but we offered the solutions for a few lakhs,” says Vaibhav, who also interned for two months as a Product Manager at Biocon in Bengaluru. During this stint, he visited seven metro cities in India to study the market before the launch of a new product. He also assisted the business development team in deciding the key parameters of the product.
Finally, in 2016, Visit Health happened. “There were lots of challenges. Primary healthcare was not very well known when we were first setting up. There was only one other company doing it,” recalls Vaibhav. However, he teamed up with three close friends – Anurag Prasad, Shashvat Tripathi and Chetan Anand, who combined their expertise and launched the company.
“We initially started with mental health support. So we built a Visit app where you could come and talk to a psychologist or a counsellor in complete privacy and at convenient times,” says Vaibhav who was awarded as the “Youth of the year” in the field of healthcare services by the Bihar government in November 2016.
Disrupting the healthcare space
He says the chief responsibility at Visit Health is helping users make important decisions about their own health and well-being as well as that of their loved one’s health. “Finding the best doctors and organisations to collaborate with is our second responsibility which is tied-in with the first,” says Vaibhav, who feels that the inconvenience of travelling and the hassles of meeting up with a doctor often ends in people self-medicating. “People tend to postpone their visits to the doctors for one or the other reason until it becomes absolutely necessary.”
Their clients include 260-plus large, medium and large corporates including IBM, Axis Bank and Oracle who have deployed Visit app for giving primary healthcare benefits to their employees. “We also have more than 6000 plus SMEs who use the app. Anything you do on the platform, you get rewarded for that and redeem those rewards for multiple day to day products of your choice from our marketplace. So that creates a lot of engagement,” he points out.
What started with four people is now a 220 plus member team based out of Gurugram, Noida, Bangalore and Mumbai.
Hope during the pandemic
They saw the full potential of their company during the pandemic, when people began to take their health a lot more seriously. “During covid, we were doing more than 240 consults every day. We deployed hotline numbers for the ones who were not able to use the app,” says Vaibhav.
Along the journey, Visit Health went on to raise more investments from some of the reputed companies including Snapdeal, Murugappa group and Policy Bazar. Even the Co-founder of Twitter Biz Stone invested in the company.
When he’s not working, Vaibhav likes to travel, play pool and watch “raw and real series” like Blacklist.
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