Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Praava Health CEO Sylvana Sinha, Bangladesh (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s focus on the first year. What did you build to qualify yourself for funding?

Sylvana Sinha: I spent that year on a listening tour. I was traveling all over the world to meet entrepreneurs and investors to understand business models and innovations in healthcare. I funded myself to do that and just live during that time.

I also engaged a firm to help me build the financial model. I had never done a financial model before. I hired a firm that had done this in healthcare and worked with similar business models. I did all the original research myself – pricing and cost. The structure of the model was built by them. That was not an insignificant cost.

Then I wrote a 100-plus-page business plan. I still look back at that plan actually. It’s interesting to think about how I envisioned it. It’s actually turned out not that different from how I originally imagined it.

Sramana Mitra: What were you going to do? When you say provide end-to-end outpatient care, what does that mean?

Sylvana Sinha: It means primary care, doctors, women’s health, pediatrics, and dentistry. I was very inspired by the impact that you could have by promoting the concept of primary care.

Sramana Mitra: Non-urgent care.

Sylvana Sinha: Correct, as well as advanced specialty – cardiology, gastroenterology, orthopedics, and dermatology. We also built in-house labs. We have six in-house labs including the first molecular cancer diagnostics in the country. One of our team members was a US-based immunologist who had the expertise to build that lab. I was very inspired by this challenge of trust. I could not afford to outsource diagnostics. We built in-house labs, in-house diagnostics, and in-house pharmacy.

Sramana Mitra: What is the cost in setting up one of these units?

Sylvana Sinha: About $5 million.

Sramana Mitra: You had to raise that?

Sylvana Sinha: No. My first round was supposed to be $5 million, but one of the investors who committed $2 million was never able to fund it. I fell short in the first round. I had to keep raising to get to day one. It took time to get to day one. I closed the first round in December of 2015. That ended up being about $2 million. Then I brought in the rest before day one in August 2017.

Sramana Mitra: Talk about how you raised this money.

Sylvana Sinha: I had done my homework. It was important to me to write that 100-page business plan. I had all my materials in place. Again, I raised the money in the same way I did the research to understand the problem. I used my own network. That was valuable. I had established myself in my career by that point ,so I had some of my own network. I did some cold emails and introduced myself to people. I ended up raising primarily from angels. Even to this day, we’ve raised almost $13 million in equity from angels.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of angels resonated with your concept?

Sylvana Sinha: It varies. Our lead investor is half-Bangladeshi and half-American, so he does have a connection to Bangladesh. But we also have a number of healthcare entrepreneurs who have invested in their personal capacities.

Most of our investors are Americans. They’re just excited about the fact that we are innovating at the edges of healthcare in a fast-growing, emerging market. There are investors who care about the impact angle. That connects with them – investors that are curious about an emerging market.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Praava Health CEO Sylvana Sinha, Bangladesh
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