Strand Life Sciences, a bioinformatics and diagnostics firm, has raised $13 million from Quadria Capital. The round also saw the participation of HealthQuad and Heritas Venture Fund.
The fresh funding comes just after a month when Strand Life Sciences acquired Triesta Sciences, a unit of Healthcare Global Enterprises (HCG) for an undisclosed amount. The merger was aimed to create an integrated platform with end-to-end capabilities in specialised diagnostics and genomics research.
In 2013, Bengaluru-based Strand Life Sciences had raised $10 million from Biomark Capital in Series B round.
Strand Life Sciences will use the fresh investment to expand its reach and scale up its operations.
Founded in 2000 by Vijay Chandru, Strand Life Sciences focuses on data mining, computational chemistry, bioinformatics, and research biology.
The company claims to have over 220 engineers, scientists, and pathologists. It also performs diagnostic tests for more than 1,000 hospitals in the country such as HCG, TMC Kolkata, Max Hospitals Delhi, Narayana Hrudayalaya and Apollo Hospitals.
The online e-commerce diagnostics firm competes with other healthcare platforms like NetMeds, MedGenome, 1mg, and Medibox, among others.
Also Read: Healthcare centric VC firm Healthquad closes Rs 75 crore corpus
The Indian healthcare sector is valued at over Rs 7 trillion and is growing at a rate of over 15% per annum making it one of the most attractive sectors for investment by the private sector. An imperative part of all this is the new age models that are unshackling the traditional forms of healthcare delivery and products including digitization of services and product innovation and disintermediation of delivery models. All these are being driven by the need to provide access, affordability and quality.
Also the online market is estimated to grow to over $42 billion in the coming years. But not many core healthcare players are entering the analytics part exclusively; they usually provide overall healthcare services like booking appointments and facilitating video chats.
The funding news was first reported by ET.
