When Mudit Vijayvergiya, Nipun Goyal and Pawan Gupta were in the final year at IIT Delhi in 2012, during a midnight coffee break, they got an idea of starting something on their own.
They started working in the healthcare sector with a medical tourism company, but they found that doctors were not connected with each other, and that the entire industry was primal about their communication towards doctors. In the end, they had to drop the idea; took different jobs, but continued their research on the concept of medical networking in India.
Only during the research did they realise the need for connectivity between doctors. Till May 2014, the trio would have met more than 1,000 doctors, and came up with the idea of Curofy — social networking platform built exclusively for doctors, encouraging them not only to embrace the digital medium, but also engage in peer-to-peer learning and knowledge-sharing. It is now India’s largest community of verified doctors.
“We launched Curofy in February 2015, and in October the same year, we raised Pre-Series A funding from Roundglass partners,” says Curofy co-founder Nipun Goyal.
Through Curofy, doctors can communicate with each other. They can provide referrals and share cases, among others. “Now, we have over 1.90 lakh doctors from various specialities across the country. We are now working on the monetisation part and plan to go global very soon,” says Goyal, adding that they are targeting certain markets like Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, among others.
When asked how difficult it was to bring doctors on board, Goyal says, “Though initially it was difficult, later more doctors came on board, as previously their communication was mostly only through social networks. Doctors are open to adopt new technology. Now, 50% of users are coming on their own.”
“From 50 specialities, we will be offering 400 sub-specialities soon, so as to provide even more relevant updates and cases for discussions,” he says.
“The network of doctors is not only an ideal situation for the doctors, but also gives the entire healthcare industry an opportunity to promote their offerings online. This has the potential of saving millions of dollars,” he adds. The startup has also partnered with pharma companies. With a team size of 39, including seven medicos, the startup plans to include many new features in future. “By 2018, we want to bring more than 1.5 million doctors across the world on our platform,” he says, adding that its vision is to become the largest doctors’ network.