Healthcare payments startup QubeHealth in talks to raise $6-9 million in series A round

Chris George, Co-founder and CEO, QubeHealth

Mumbai-based QubeHealth, a healthcare payments startup, is in talks to raise $6-9 million in a series A round over the next three to four months from a Japanese fund and a Singaporean fund. The round is also expected to see participation by its existing investors, including Inflection Point Ventures, Keiretsu Forum, Axiomatic Ventures, New Horizon Ventures, Mohit Burman (Chairman of Dabur India), and other family offices, sources in the know told Moneycontrol.

According to a source, a major portion of the fresh capital will be used to develop and expand QubeHealth’s artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. “A big chunk of funding is going to go into AI tech for predictive spend pattern analysis. The startup is also going to expand deeper into building out its financial security layer,” the source elaborated.

The startup will also build an online healthcare marketplace on the app, which will list hospitals, clinics, pharmacies and diagnostic centres across cities and neighbourhoods, the source said.

Post this round, the startup’s valuation may double to Rs 400 crore, one of the sources cited above said. This comes less than six months after the startup’s pre-series A topup round of Rs 25 crore, which reportedly happened at a valuation of Rs 200 crore.

Founded in 2020 by Chris George and Gagan Kapur, QubeHealth is a B2B startup that offers two key products: Qube Pay, a UPI-based payments feature that gives up to 10 percent cashback on every transaction; and Qube Cash, a healthcare credit line offering up to Rs 10 lakh at no-cost EMIs for up to 12 months. The credit line product is offered to employees of the corporates the startup has partnered with.

The credit line offering also covers healthcare areas such as expensive procedures for eye care, dental care, skin care and even pet care, which isn’t usually covered by an employee’s regular group health insurance. So, the employee can use this credit line to pay for such services and convert them into no-cost EMIs over 1-12 months. The employees can also use this money to pay hospital bills up front, which QubeHealth can later adjust with the insurance money coming in.

The employer or the corporate partner can include QubeHealth’s offering as an add-on benefit on top of the insurance policy with a subscription fee of Rs 720 per employee a year.

QubeHealth plans to disburse Rs 50 crore in medical credit in 2024. The credit amount offered, starts at Rs 30,000 and depends on the employee’s credit score, salary range, employer etc. It has over 300 corporate partners covering around 150,000 employees and their families, and a network of 12,000 hospitals and clinics. The corporate employer partners include Swiggy, ITC Hotels, Upstox, Reserve Bank of India, Zenoti, Financepeer, Prism Johnson and SBI Life, to name a few.

The two products have been in the market for over a year, and the app sees 30,000 monthly active users, a figure that is growing at around 40 percent month on month, one of the sources claimed.

According to data accessed from Tracxn, QubeHealth clocked Rs 8.5 crore in revenue from operations in FY23, recording 17.9 percent YoY growth. Losses for the period ballooned 44.6 percent YoY to Rs 4.58 crore.