Your journey didn’t start in a boardroom… how did those early days shape you?
My journey didn’t begin with a pitch deck or a strategy offsite, it began with survival, curiosity, and a willingness to get my hands dirty. At 19, when I started a computer assembly business, I wasn’t thinking about scale or valuations. I was thinking about how to make things work, how to sell, how to fix, how to earn trust one customer at a time.
Those early years taught me something that no business school can, reality sits on the ground, not in presentations. When you’ve dealt with customers directly, handled cash flows yourself, and seen things break in real time, you develop a very different instinct for building.
When I later entered healthcare, especially in India, I realised that the system is far more complex than it appears. It’s fragmented, trust-deficient, and deeply human. Those early experiences helped me stay close to reality, to customers, to operations, and to problems that don’t show up in dashboards.
What was the “aha moment” behind Healthians?
While working in healthcare marketing and medical value travel, I had a front-row seat to how healthcare works globally versus in India. One thing stood out. In most systems, the first touchpoint is diagnosis, but in India, diagnostics was treated as a passive, almost invisible function.
The real “aha moment” wasn’t a single event, it was a pattern. I saw that everything in healthcare treatment, cost, stress escalates because we enter too late. And the only way to change that is to shift the starting point from illness to awareness.
Diagnostics, if done right, could become that first line of defence.
That’s when the idea clicked not to build another diagnostics company, but to reimagine diagnostics as a preventive, tech-led, at home experience. That became Healthians.
You faced 11 funding rejections before Yuvraj Singh came on board. Looking back, what was the most common skepticism from investors, and how did you use that to refine the Healthians model?
The skepticism was actually very valid. Investors questioned whether:
- Indians would trust home diagnostics
- Quality could be maintained outside hospitals
- Preventive healthcare would ever become a habit
At that time, diagnostics was synonymous with hospitals. What we were proposing felt counterintuitive.
- But those rejections forced us to sharpen the model:
- Build strong quality control systems
- Standardise sample collection
- Use technology to eliminate human error
- Focus deeply on trust, not just convenience In hindsight, those rejections didn’t slow us down, they made the foundation stronger
Building trust in home diagnostics. How difficult was it?
Extremely difficult, because we were not just building a service, we were changing behaviour.
Healthcare decisions are deeply emotional. People associate hospitals with safety. Asking them to trust a home service for something as critical as diagnostics required us to rethink everything.
We realised early that:
- Trust cannot be marketed, it has to be engineered
- Every process must be standardised
- Every interaction must reinforce credibility
From tamper-proof kits to trained phlebotomists to tech-enabled quality checks, everything was designed to remove doubt. Over time, customers didn’t just adopt the service, they shifted their mindset. And that’s when we knew we were not just scaling a business, but shaping a category.
You recently transitioned from Executive positions from Healthians. Was this decision personal or strategic?
It was both, but primarily strategic and evolutionary.
After building Healthians over a decade, I realised that the company had reached a stage where it needed institutional leadership, not founder dependency. A strong professional team was already in place, and empowering them was the natural next step.
At a personal level, I’ve always been a builder. I enjoy the early stages, the uncertainty, the problem solving, the creation. Once systems stabilise, my role evolves. Stepping back was not about moving away but it was about moving forward differently. It allows Healthians to scale as an institution, while I focus on solving new problems and supporting other builders.
You’ve just unveiled UN:BLOC on World Health Day. What blockages in the current system are you aiming to clear?
I chose World Health Day deliberately. Because the question I wanted to ask needed the largest possible room.
Twenty-five years in healthcare taught me one uncomfortable truth: the system is not broken. It is working exactly as it was designed to. The design, however, was never centred on the patient getting better. It was centred on the patient being managed.
When I finally asked that question myself, with the same diagnostic rigour I had applied to millions of patients over two decades, the answer changed everything. Not just for me. For how I understood every patient I had ever served.
UN:BLOC is built on that upstream question. And it is a question the current healthcare system is structurally, not maliciously, but structurally, designed not to ask.
That is the blockage I am here to clear. Not a process. Not a policy. A question. I am sure with our launch in July what exactly we will do and how it will be crystal clear. For now, what I will say is this: the founding thesis is real. The science behind it is real. The early results are real.
You are backing the next wave of founders through your Rs 100 crore fund. Beyond a good pitch deck, what specific traits do you look for in entrepreneurs?
When I announced this commitment in January, the question I got most was: why now, and why so broadly consumer brands, deep tech, AI? The honest answer is that the fund reflects exactly how I think about building: category and convention matter less than the person holding the idea.
I have backed Handpickd, Beanly, Repill, Indian Sneaker Fest, and others. What connects them is not the sector. It is the founder.
I look for three things that no pitch deck can fake.
First, founders who have lived the problem. The empathy that comes from personal experience of a broken system cannot be manufactured. It shows in every decision, especially the difficult ones.
Second, founders who formed a view of the future before they built the solution. Healthians was built on the belief that Indians would pay for preventive diagnostics at home, years before that behaviour existed. The market validated the view. The view always comes first.
Third, founders who are genuinely, stubbornly customer-first. India has an extraordinary tendency to build for the system’s convenience rather than the person it serves. The founders who flip that, in any sector, are the ones I want behind.
Capital is the easy part. What I am really committing is the twenty-five years of mistakes I have already made on their behalf.
If Healthians changed how India perceives diagnostics, what do you want the legacy of UN:BLOC to be?
Healthians gave India a mirror. It said, here is your health, clearly, at your doorstep, without the friction that kept you from looking.
UN:BLOC wants to change what India does when it looks in that mirror.
For too long, the conversation between a patient and their health has been: here is what is wrong with you, here is what manages it, come back in three months. It begins and ends with the disease. The patient is a bystander in their own biology.
I want UN:BLOC’s legacy to be the moment that conversation changed. When patients stopped asking only “what do I have?” and started asking “why do I have it?” When that second question, the harder, deeper, more important one, became as natural as the first.
My doctor friends, many of whom have spent decades in this system, tell me this is the question their patients have always wanted to ask but never had the language or the permission for. If UN:BLOC gives them that language, and the evidence backed answers to go with it, that is legacy enough.
I am not trying to replace medicine. I am trying to complete the conversation it started.
What is the one thing about scaling healthcare in India that most tech first founders overlook?
Trust. And the specific nature of how trust is built in healthcare.
Technology can build speed, scale, and access. It cannot build the belief that something genuinely works. In every other consumer category, you can acquire a user, deliver an experience, and earn loyalty through that experience alone.
In healthcare the stakes are different. The person on the other side is not trying a new food delivery app. They are making decisions about their body, their family, their future. The threshold for trust is categorically higher, and the speed at which technology moves is categorically mismatched with the pace at which clinical trust is earned.
The founders who have scaled healthcare in India sustainably, across every category, are the ones who built clinical credibility first and technology second. The ones who failed are, almost without exception, the ones who inverted that order.
I learned this at Healthians not by getting it right from the beginning. I learned it by watching what happened when we prioritised operational speed over clinical quality, and correcting courses quickly enough to survive the lesson.
Technology is the vehicle. Clinical trust is the road. You cannot drive faster than the road allows.
By the end of this decade, do you believe India will be a global benchmark for preventive healthcare, or are we still too far away?
I am genuinely optimistic. But not for the reason most people cite.
The optimism I hear most often is about infrastructure, more facilities, more schemes, more digital health records. These matter. But infrastructure without behaviour change is a road with no drivers.
The reason I am optimistic is more fundamental. India’s relationship with its own body is changing. A generation of Indians is growing up with access to information their parents never had. They are questioning things their parents accepted. They are asking their doctors questions that would have been considered impertinent ten years ago.
That questioning instinct, applied to health, is the most powerful preventive force in existence. More powerful than any policy or programme.
Where I think we deeply underestimate ourselves. India is the only country in the world that has a 5,000 year documented medical tradition and a 21st-century technology infrastructure in the same room simultaneously. No other nation has that combination. If we learn to use both, not as competitors but as complements, India does not just become a benchmark for preventive healthcare. India becomes the source code the rest of the world learns from.
We are not too far away. We are, for the first time, close enough that the people building the future can see it clearly.