India’s MedPay Nets $1.2M To Link Insurance, Healthcare Payments

MedPay, an Indian company that says it uses artificial intelligence to provide quick payments from health insurance companies to providers such as doctors or pharmacies, announced it raised $1.2 million in an early venture round.

The investors, according to a MedPay news release, are Entrepreneur First and GrowX Ventures.

“With its AI-powered platform, MedPay aspires to build India’s largest integrated Primary Healthcare Network and enable healthcare centers to accept insurance payments in real-time, while facilitating a cashless claim process for the insured,” the news release states.

The news release continues: “Currently, MedPay CCN has access to 50,000+ health centers spread across 450 cities covering 4000+ pin codes. In other words, every neighborhood in India has a MedPay CCN-enabled pharmacy, clinic and diagnostic lab (pathology and radiology).”

Esha Tiwary, general manager for India at Entrepreneur First, said of MedPay: “Their smart distribution strategy has allowed them to expand rapidly and become the backbone connecting healthcare service providers across 450 cities. We are excited about their next phase of growth and disruption of this sector through a very innovative business model.”

Manu Rikhye, a partner at GrowX Ventures, said in a prepared statement: “One of the key drivers of low adoption of health insurance in India is lack of an organized and large primary healthcare network. MedPay is leveraging tech to build India’s largest such network that not only allows patients to access and consume services in a frictionless manner, but also facilitates businesses and insurers to leverage a reliable, diverse and pan-India network to acquire new customer segments and significantly lower cost per transaction.”

MedPay executives state in marketing materials that the company had its origins in the chaos affecting health care providers and payers as COVID-19 took hold.  The sentiment was shared by finance and health care executives in other parts of the world.

In one United States example, Santander Bank partnered with Revenue Management Solutions to offer health care providers a way to expedite and simplify the processing of collecting payments from insurers and other payers.