DocTalk's CEO resigns right after a pivot; 100 employees laid off in 2018

DocTalk, an application that had been created to ease out the communication procedure between doctors and patients, is headed towards a pivot with no CEO and 100 fewer employees.

The app has been on the leg to change from its original mechanism for a while and they have built an electronic medical record (EMR) solution, which would help doctors write prescriptions over the customised prescription templates digitally, for the same.

In the original model, the service was spread across two applications, DocTalk for Patients, and DocTalk for Doctors. From the former, it charged a subscription fee on registration and an initiation fee from the latter. The subscription was available in monthly, quarterly, or annual packages.

The users of this application, who had paid these fees have been giving highly critical reviews, complaining about the lack of communication on the platform, the core selling point of the app, and also regarding the lack of help by the customer care. These can be considered as the core reasons behind the pivot.

Right after the pivot, the CEO of the health-tech company Akshat Goenka resigned in August, claiming to be taking a break from work due to health and other personal issues, as per a Mint report. Further, 100 performing and non-performing employees of the firm have also been laid off throughout 2018, reducing the remaining workforce to less than 40 employees.

Talking about numbers, the Mumbai-based company has raised $5 million so far in two seed rounds in past one and a half year from VCs like Matrix Partners, Vy Capital, Khosla Ventures, Altair Capital, Liquid2 Ventures etc. It has been a part of Y Combinator’s acceleration program since its inception almost 2 years ago.

In June this year, ET reported the company to be in talks to raise a $10 million round from a group of investors led by Nexus Venture Partners.

Performance wise, both the applications have less than 15k downloads on Google Play altogether, and as per data by SimilarWeb the website has less than 5000 monthly visitors.

Since the firm is going through major restructuring, with the pivot, change in top leadership, and laying off of employee force, it remains to be seen if these performance numbers of the firm improve in future.