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Building India’s 911 | Prabhdeep Singh @ StanPlus
382 Plays2 years ago
Thousands of lives are lost every day due to delays in accessing ambulances on time. India can save over 20% of patients suffering cardiac arrest every year if ambulances/ first aid care facilities reach them in a timely manner. StanPlus is a medical emergency response platform that is solving the problem of access to ambulances. Prabhdeep talks about the unique challenges of building in the healthcare space in India, some of the smart decisions he took around following an asset-light approach and how he scaled up StanPlus.
Know about:-
- Triaging and the related issues
- Integrating with hospitals
- Taking the transaction layer out of ambulance service
- Ambulances as dark stores
Recommended
Transcript
Solving Healthcare Access in India
00:00:22
Speaker
Hi everyone, my name is Travdeep Singh and I am the founder and CEO of Standplus.
00:00:22
Speaker
In Western countries, a lot of problems faced by the Aam Adni are solved by the government. Whereas in India, it is enterprising startups which are solving problems for Indians at scale. Think of education. I bet edtech startups are doing more to solve education-related challenges than any government expenditure is.
00:00:45
Speaker
And similarly is the case for a lot of other things, financial inclusion, access to broadband, internet, and so on. In this conversation, I talked to Prabhdeep Singh, the founder of Stand Plus. Stand Plus is solving the problem of access to ambulances. In the West, you would probably dial a number like 911 and you would get an ambulance at your doorstep within a certain fixed time.
00:01:07
Speaker
free of cost. But in India, this would hardly be the case. You may not get ambulance on time. Most people in metro cities may prefer to call a hospital to send its ambulance, which would probably be a paid service. And there are numerous other cases of loss of life due to lack of access to ambulance.
00:01:23
Speaker
And this is exactly the problem that Stand Plus is solving at scale. The goal of Stand Plus is to make an ambulance available anywhere in the country within 10 minutes free of cost.
Host Introduction and Guest's Background
00:01:33
Speaker
In this fascinating conversation, Prabhupdeep talks about the unique challenges of building in the healthcare space in India and some of the smart decisions he took around following an asset-like approach and how he scaled up Stand Plus to where it is today. You're listening to the founder thesis podcast, and I'm your host, Akshay Dutt.
00:01:59
Speaker
I moved to Mumbai in 2006-11, worked in Glenmark from 2011-15, moved to NCR from 2015-16, and that's how I ended up using Google seconds.
00:02:11
Speaker
Was INSEAD like a transformational experience for you? I would argue that I've had four transformational experiences, right? Moving from Chandigarh to Mumbai was one. Doing the course that I did five years, right? Then that was one, right? 2006 to 2011 was one. Then working with Glenn and seeing Glenmark scale up was two.
00:02:35
Speaker
INSEAD was three and then coming out of INSEAD and actually spending the last five years building stand plus has been the next transformation, right? But if I were to priority rank these transformational experiences, the land building process, the human building process, I think INSEAD's one year was the most, it was on steroids. It was transformation on extremely high pressure, high agility requirement and
00:03:04
Speaker
It's not only for me, it is for everyone who studied there. It's everyone who experienced. When I had not traveled to more than three countries before NCR and at NCR, I traveled to 21 countries, right? So you can just compare the exposures. And this is over 10 to 11 months. And while NMI-MS was 60 people in CR was 600. While NMI-MS was all fresh here, we had people with
00:03:26
Speaker
experience in journalism, in tennis coaching, in massive consulting projects, in uranium mining. So suddenly, it was a very different world.
00:03:36
Speaker
the exposure, the challenges, the amount of days that I cried that I am not enough was amazing. So I was very, I was fairly the smartest man in every room. And except that when the leadership meeting happened, there had no clue what was happening. Top 10s in school, top 12 in schools, all India MS was the first to get placed at the college, right? And suddenly I didn't see how you're like, Hey man, what's happening?
00:04:02
Speaker
So you could be great at one thing, but you have someone whose world's best at another sitting next to you and you're like, okay, truly humbling experience.
Inspiration and Founding of Stand Plus
00:04:13
Speaker
But that's what NCR dot, perhaps any global preschool is all about, right? It brings you to a situation. It puts you in a place where you really get humbled. And then as you start from foundational level, rebuilding who you are, I think you're learning accelerates because A, you've brought in super smart people.
00:04:31
Speaker
people who are used to working Harvard, people who have been in these high pressure situations before, but people who've not always been told that you're not the smartest, right? And suddenly that works magic on people. And I was really bad at finance and accounting and I talked accounting at NCI, right? That's how hard I worked to find my place there.
00:04:52
Speaker
I was like, what is the subject that I absolutely am the worst at? I want to do my best doing that. That was accounting. And honestly, people say that MBA doesn't matter, but it helped me a lot. Global MBA at NCR, network, my friends, the coaching, the travels. It helped me a lot in building a business. It gave me the courage to come off NCR and lose samples.
00:05:13
Speaker
You did Stan plus straight out of NCN. Did you within during that one year program, did you like start thinking about it or like how did that happen? So let's take a step back, right? As I was at Denmark, a couple of things happened. I was situated in Brazil in 2014. And for some reason, my dad wasn't feeling well. And it was perhaps cardiac, perhaps not cardiac. India made other cardiac gas of the year. So so as you're there 14 hours away,
00:05:43
Speaker
I felt the helplessness that a lot of people feel. Akshay, you told me before we started this that you live in Japan, and I was assuming that you often feel this helplessness, that I was assuming you have family in India, and you're so far away that even if you want to help your hours, days, and perhaps a generation away in a way, that's the helplessness that we feel.
00:06:05
Speaker
So the idea was that there I am in Brazil and my mom, like a lot of women of her generation, doesn't rise. And my sister's not there as well. I was sippling my sister. She runs a restaurant go-ups and it's my mom and my dad. And I felt that helplessness. Right. So somewhere in my head and in my heart, there was this gel of an idea that in India, the emergency services really do not exist. And at that time in Brazil, I would have given up
00:06:34
Speaker
any amount of money to make sure that someone could help my dad in the most clinically qualified, timely manner. Fortunately, it was nothing. It's completely fine now. But that was the original story. Then right before in Seattle, I was in Hyderabad doing a Salesforce Effectiveness
Challenges in Emergency Response in India
00:06:50
Speaker
Project for the Cardiology Division of Denmark. So as I was visiting the cardiologists, the intensivists and the ER heads, right, to sell them this medicine, they often opened up to me and said,
00:07:04
Speaker
People don't actually reach on time for some of these medicines and I was like, what do you mean? People are as per globally accepted protocols and as per WHO recommended timelines. If people get emergency help within one hour of symptoms showing what we call in clinical parlance as the golden hour,
00:07:24
Speaker
the chances of survival are actually much better. I mean, the chances of survival are much better. At the same time, in medicine, there is a term known as triaging. Triaging essentially means understanding what the situation is and taking priority decisions on what to do. For example, we are going through the Ukraine-Russia war and
00:07:44
Speaker
The medical team on ground is doing triaging. For example, these are triaging that are done almost all the time in an emergency room. Do you save a 10 year old boy or an 80 year old man with the same symptoms? The triaging would say save the 10 year old boy rather than an 80 year old man.
00:08:00
Speaker
Do you save a 35-year-old man who has better chances of survival or a 50-year-old man who has worse chances of survival? You go ahead and you save 35-year-old, right? So this is what happens in a worker and triaging. But in ER, triaging essentially means you take symptoms, you understand what the situation is, and then you take the next steps in making sure that the chances of survival are maximized. But across the world, we humans, we do triaging for ourselves, right?
00:08:30
Speaker
So, for example, if I wake up every morning and I feel a certain way, but one morning I feel, I wake up, I feel dizzy, I'm sweating, I'm anxious, I have palpitations, in my head, I am already triaging and say, hey, this is Dr. Anwar, right? But a lot of people, we ignore and we basically take a triaging step that, hey, this couldn't be serious. It doesn't happen to me. I am young. So, the concept here is that
00:08:54
Speaker
We make a lot of triaging errors in India because we don't have a central triaging mechanism. In the US, we have 911.
00:09:02
Speaker
In Europe, we have 112, 999, and I'm assuming you have a number in Japan as well that you can call for emergency services. In India, even though we have 108 that is scaled out, it is not truly a triaging system. It's a transport system. It's an ambulance system, right? So as I was sitting with these doctors, they said that, look, people don't reach on time. People self-diagnose, self-triage and often make those errors.
00:09:26
Speaker
So Prabh, we would love for a company to come in and do something in this, right? Number one, I'm in Brazil, my dad in India, helplessness. Number two, the payers, the doctors, the clinicians telling me there's a company here. Number three, 2014 to 2016 is also an era of uberization of everything, right? So when I was talking startups, that was, I think, phase two of startups, right? Phase one being the Flipkart era, phase two being the Uber Diwala era.
00:09:56
Speaker
The gig economy era, basically. The gig economy, right? And I experienced that firsthand, but I already had the admit twins and I was like, okay, you know what? I am going to NCR to become a consultant. Great idea. Someone will build it. Someone will do it. And I went to NCR for very hard to become a consultant and
00:10:17
Speaker
I remember I said I lived in Brazil for a while. I picked up some Portuguese and
Innovation and Partnerships
00:10:22
Speaker
got a job with Boston Consulting Group to move to Sao Paulo and become a consultant with the Brazilian office, which is amazing. Perhaps the only Indian ever to get a Latin American VCG or a Bain job, right? Maybe the only member in my generation. So those were the funny things and very interesting thing happened.
00:10:41
Speaker
We often speak about serendipity in entrepreneurship. This is serendipity at its best. As NCIART started, a week before the coursework, some of us got together and said, why don't we do a beer trip? So we did the Riviera, South of France drive. We were hosted by a French gentleman known as Alton Porsot.
00:11:04
Speaker
happened to have a special affiliation to India because he was in India right before INSEAD and he was setting up on behalf of Reliance and his French firm called Riva, one of India's largest concentrated solar plant in Rajasthan. So as I started speaking to him, I realized that this guy knows more about India than a lot of Indians because he had lived and worked for a year in Rajasthan. He had lived in Mumbai, lived in Delhi.
00:11:31
Speaker
And it was amazing for me to hear his story. And then he happened to say something very interesting, right? He said, one of the most unfortunate parts about West Indian India is that we lost an employee because of an occupational accident. And unfortunately, no ambulance was available on site or perhaps the ambulance available was not of proper caliber. So it couldn't save the life. And I was like, Hey, what are you even talking about? You know what? I have an idea. So
00:11:59
Speaker
So this was three weekends in a French chateau. That's what we are speaking about. And we started discussing that. And there was another gentleman there called Jose Leon, who's Costa Rican. And he said, guys, if you ever need to build technology behind this idea, I did a past startup.
00:12:15
Speaker
similar to shuttle or cello now, right? In gotureka. So I have actually the stack available in case you want to replicate that to ambulances, right? Because in the end, he used to do these micro buses that used to come and pick people up is I have that stack available, the uber stack available to replicate if you need the logistics planning, right? So we started talking about it. And
00:12:37
Speaker
That serendipity. A few of us get together before INSEAD and start talking about India and shared experiences. As INSEAD progressed, I was still certain that I want to do consulting, but this conning in me that I have to solve this, continue to evolve. And then Antoine, Jose and I, we presented to INSEAD Venture Competition. It's an incubation come startup, sharp tank at INSEAD. And we've got that.
00:13:07
Speaker
We won that and they gave us a check of 15,000 euros with a condition that it will not be wired to your accounts, but it will be wired to the future entity if you create. Which was a good catalyst for us. But I still had that offer the signed letter with BCG to take care of, right?
00:13:23
Speaker
So I go to them and I said, hey guys, I want to go back to India and start up something. Would you mind if I take a year's depth through it and come back next year? And they said, Prabh, we liked you. We want you to come to Sao Paulo. We've spent a lot of time and money interviewing you, wining and dining you at various locations.
00:13:43
Speaker
So we need you to come. I said, okay, give me one year. I'm going to India. I'm starting something up and I'll come next year. They said, okay. They absolutely hate me. So three of us moved to India. We graduated in June and July, we were in India trying to set something up and that's something became Stantless.
00:14:05
Speaker
Isn't there, I mean, it's not easy for a person who's not an Indian citizen to come in and you need those work permits and I think there's a lot of bureaucracy and red tape around that, right? Like being able to, I don't know as a founder if it's there or not, but I know if you want to employ someone from outside, there is a lot of bureaucracy. Did you face any of those challenges in setting it up?
00:14:29
Speaker
There are certainly challenges about if you're a foreigner and you want to come in and create a company in India, it's not easy. And in 2000 and now you've moved to 2016, July, right? In July, 2016, it wasn't easy as well. It was arguably more difficult because A, we were poor. So we couldn't afford the top consulting or the top help that we can hire now that the company scan, right? And B, even before docking,
00:14:56
Speaker
directorships and companies and incorporation, we were still solving for visas. So what we did, though, is we incorporated in Singapore first and we said, OK, let's get that 15000 euros in so that we can at least tell our parents that we got some job.
Regulatory and Market Challenges
00:15:10
Speaker
We started our company in Singapore and moved to India with tourist visas, got some help and then set up an entity in India. So our Singapore entity was set up in September 16 and India entity actually got incorporated, I think, in November.
00:15:26
Speaker
So that's how we did it. But I think it's a good segue to actually, as government of India encourages more startups, I think we also need to understand not all startups will be done by people in India of Indian origin. Many startups will be built by people who see India as an opportunity, want to move from outside. Initially it could be Indians, but then we want to encourage people who are non-Indians to also come in and become employers here, right? And create companies.
00:15:54
Speaker
There are hardly any examples. I mean, everyone I speak to gives Zunkar as an example, right? But if you speak to the Zunkar founders, they've not had it easy. Duan and Jose didn't have it easy here. And today, I didn't say co-founder and founder because both of them are founder emeritus because over the next two, three years, they realized that while they love India, they love Indians, they love the culture.
00:16:15
Speaker
But India has a quadruple problem, I often say this. And as we scale up the Indian enterprises, young enterprises, right? And as we scale up the work ethic, I think there are four problems that we are actively fighting as companies starting up in India. One is your vendors. Second is your customers.
00:16:33
Speaker
Third is your employees, and fourth is your regulations. Vendors don't deliver what they contractually promise. Customers don't pay on time, and they don't contractually honor the SLAs both ways. If the SLAs are X, they want to do X, and if the money is Y, they want to pay Y by 2.
00:16:52
Speaker
Employees work ethic is improving, but there's a long way to go because I've lived in France, I lived in Brazil, lived in Singapore, worked across geographies. And I can tell you that Indian work ethic is going to be the single biggest productivity contributor after automation in the near future. And we are seeing a lot of young people with amazing work ethic coming out of universities and colleges. I think we still have some work to do there.
00:17:15
Speaker
And fourth is the regulations, right? We, as startups evolve and scale, regulations chase the startups rather than startups chasing regulation, right? Which is amazing, unsettling for us because we can build and regulations follow. But at the same time, there are certain regulations that take time to understand. Like for example, if you're a foreigner in India and you get, government defines your minimum salary. And, but at the same time, government also defines the PF rules, right? You may profit in fund for a foreigner.
00:17:42
Speaker
which is a long-term saving plan. And the expat has absolutely no reason to invest in long-term saving plan in India, because the person is looking for a short-term three, five, 10 years journey, which we should encourage, right? But in India, if you're paying, let's say, a certain component of your base as PF,
00:18:01
Speaker
We have government defines the lower limit of the salary, but then government has a very strict PF rule that it can't be just based. It has to be the entire CDC staff. So the cost of hiring a foreigner or a non-Indian actually is very expensive. And we learned this hard way. The HR of KMM, the first few set of human resource talent didn't know this.
00:18:22
Speaker
The consultants didn't know this. It's only when we got the first notice, this is the passport and the officers, they said, hey, but these are the rules. We're like, oh, wow. So that's what I mean. The fourth pillar that we can actually, that startups face as a challenger, Indian companies face a challenge is the regulation. Things are getting better. I don't want to come across as a complaining cat, but I do think that this is important.
00:18:45
Speaker
Realization that we had in 2016 as we moved in, expecting a lot of things to be easy. They were easier than we thought. Then we also make that statement. When we were building business out of NCR, then we were getting incubated there. We had a choice of selecting the geography where we want to get based in.
00:19:05
Speaker
The same problem that's in India is also in Indonesia, is also in Thailand. And since we were moving out of France and out of Singapore, because we did insiads in multiple geographies, right? And we had an opportunity to choose the country. And we chose India, despite knowing that it's arguably tougher than many of the other geographies that we were considering. Having said that, it was easier to build in India than being taught or being advertised outside. But as yet, stupid things were stupidly difficult.
00:19:34
Speaker
So tell
Business Model and Scaling Strategies
00:19:35
Speaker
me about that go to market journey. So you had a little bit of money. Was that enough to launch? And did you want to launch like a Uber model asset line, just create a technology layer or tell me how you went about building it? When we were in our fourth semester at NCR, we were all in Singapore doing an exchange and as that fourth
00:20:00
Speaker
end semester ended and we went to, we called the periods and we moved back to transfer our last period. We had about 10 days of break that most of the people used to go to go pay. The three of us decided to come to Mumbai and do a quick market survey. And I see major learnings in this industry. Number one, and these are the earnings in 16, right? They are no longer applicable today because we have three young people who came from the B school.
00:20:25
Speaker
to Mumbai. The first trip that we did in an ambulance was from Andheri to Mumbai and we had three major rungs. Number one, India has more ambulances than it requires. Okay, that's counterintuitive. I would have thought there is a shortage of ambulances. Number two, those ambulances are not really ambulances as the world defines it, as Andhoan and Jose saw it. And that's where your counter intuition is actually right. Even though we have enough ambulances as the ambulances operator define it,
00:20:54
Speaker
The patients don't really define these as ambulances. The hospitals don't really define these as ambulances. These are really a stretcher in a van. And number three is that demand is actually pooled around hospitals. Okay. So demand for ambulances, right? So I think number one, India has enough ambulances.
00:21:15
Speaker
It goes great with the Uberization model, right? You have an existing supply that you could on-go down the black for. But number two, that the supply actually is of terrible quality actually goes against the grain because when you want to have the demand supply black for, you want the supply to be standardized and be of that minimal acceptable quality.
00:21:34
Speaker
for your patient experience to actually be better. It's not only enough for you to deliver over in seven, eight minutes. You actually also need to make sure the car's clean, the driver's well-behaved, right? So we said, okay, win one, enough supply, loss one, unstandardized, low-quality supply. So basically no supply, right? So they cancel each other out.
00:21:56
Speaker
But number three, demands centered around hospitals. So we said, Hey, this is a problem for us, right? Because we wanted to create a B2C marketplace, right? We want, as we came out, our pitch to the INSEAD venture competition was we are going to create a platform where we're going to aggregate existing supply and demand.
00:22:14
Speaker
and take a cut commission or every time a transaction is fulfilled on that platform. It was really interesting because this fundamentally is still what we are doing today in 10 different iterations. But at that time, I was solving for the three problems, three insights. We have enough supply that's of not good quality and the demand is actually not B2C, it is B2V. You're saying demand is around hospitals. By that you mean it's the hospitals who are actually paying ambulances and
00:22:42
Speaker
Now, in case of emergencies, Indians do five things. Number one, they call their family. Or two, they call the most medically qualified family member that they know. We call them family physicians in India or family doctors. Number three, they call the hospitals. Number four, they call their employer.
00:23:01
Speaker
Number five, they call the insurance company and the reason is different. We call the family to say something wrong has happened. We try to call the family doctor to say, they call the hospital to say, can we bring, is this the right hospital? Do you have a bed available, et cetera.
00:23:18
Speaker
They call their employer to say, something has happened. Is my insurance there? Does my insurance cover this? Then they call the insurance to ask if this hospital is cashless, if there is reimbursement. So many decisions. Either we make one call or all five. But in this, delays happen. And invariably,
00:23:39
Speaker
People end up at hospitals, right? Dead or alive. Because in India, you can't pronounce someone dead unless a medical practitioner says so. And that is usually at a hospital. So people end up dead or alive at a hospital. And then we make massive mistakes in choosing the hospital. We end up at a neighborhood clinic that doesn't have a cath lab for heart attacks, doesn't have a CT scan for strokes, doesn't have an orthopedician or an intensivist or whatsoever the team is required for an accident or virtual trauma, right?
00:24:05
Speaker
We end up at a wrong hospital, then we have to go to some other hospital. So all these require ambulances. So like ending up at the wrong hospital, so you call an ambulance to take you to the right. Right. So demand is centered and pulled around hospitals.
00:24:21
Speaker
Either people want to come into the hospital or they want to go from that hospital to another hospital, etc. So we said that, are we creating a P2C model here rather than a P2C model here? Because it's easier for me to partner with the hospital and say, Sir, can I manage your medical response?
00:24:38
Speaker
Rather than go to every customer and say, in the next 10 years, if you have an emergency, you please contact. Yeah. Yeah. That's a tough battle to fight. It's easier for me to go to an employer and say, hi, TCS or hi Spotify. I know you have many employees in India and many of these employees will call your HR team or your security team when there's an emergency.
00:24:56
Speaker
What would you do? I know you have absolutely nowhere with all to manage it, especially in work from home environments where earlier you had control of the narrative. Now people are working all over the country. What happens if someone in Chhansi who's your programmer or developer gets into an emergency situation? What do you do? They will call you. Can you please bring us in?
00:25:15
Speaker
So the model became, on the demand side, a B2B and B2B2C. And it became a subscription, which is a SaaS plus incident model. So we integrate and we charge for that. And we deliver service, we charge for that. So it's a SaaS plus marketplace. Integrate with hospitals?
00:25:36
Speaker
communicate with hospitals, with employers, with insurance companies, with your automobile, with anyone that delivers safety signals or contextual information in emergencies, right? So for example, going forward, as continuous blood glucose monitoring systems come in, as Gokey launches more variables that are health focused or smart mattresses come in.
00:25:55
Speaker
All of these devices that are smart, that interact with our health, release health information, in which a lot of emergency data is hidden. If you are able to take that information and contextualize it, we will be able to respond faster. So that's what I mean by integrations. At the base level, when we started integrating with hospitals, then we scaled up for employers. Now we are scaling up for devices and ecosystem partners.
00:26:19
Speaker
So Jan, was it one was going to a hospital and saying, I will manage your ambulance ecosystem for you. We will manage your emergency response system. Why are you running the BPO? You are really bad at running a call center. Why do you have five people answering emergency calls when you can have zero and focus on treating patients? So in hospitals across India, imagine the number of people answering emergency calls, right? And imagine if all of these could be centralized under our ecosystem.
00:26:49
Speaker
We could arguably do a better job at the training, at triaging, at technology. So that's what we do today. Many, many top hospitals in the country don't want to answer their emergency calls. They don't want to run their ambulance system. They don't want to do the triaging with technology. All they want to do is when the patient calls and then magic, the patient shows up. The third party logistics is all done with us.
00:27:09
Speaker
Tell me about the evolution now. So like the first hospital you signed up with, was it just like the response system? Or did you also integrate with ambulances and put GPS sensors so you can track where it is? And how is that evolved to today? For the hospitals? First principles thinking, Akshay, you're doing the first principles thinking that's what we did. We basically went to a hospital and we said, we will answer your calls. We will take smart decisions on which ambulance to send for which case.
00:27:38
Speaker
So, let's say in Delhi, right? Midanta is in Gurdau, the patient is in, let's say, North Delhi. Before us, Midanta would be sending an ambulance all the way from South to North, taking an hour, right? Now a hospital can answer a call in two seconds, use an ambulance that we have in North Delhi, pick up the patient and cut one-way journey. And then a lot of patients who call into Midanta because they've tried a lot of hospitals in North Delhi,
00:28:04
Speaker
And no one has answered. As we scale up, everyone benefits because in India, the statistics are really dire. 14% of Indians actually get an ambulance when they need one. I'm not talking about on-tying. I'm talking about people who actually get one, right? Rest, just take the personal transport. So what we are saying is that, and hospitals often ask us this because we work with many hospitals in the city.
00:28:28
Speaker
And the first question when we go for our pitch and when we went for the pitches, stay particular partner with so many hospitals, how will I benefit? And then we say, we always tell them it's not how the pie is cut problem right now. It's not a market share problem. It's the size of the pie problem, right? Only 14% of Indians are getting an ambulance or getting emergency help. As we scale up and as we bring everyone onto a network and we bring better supply, more patients will end up alive into the hospital. It saves
00:28:56
Speaker
It is an amazing thing for the family to be able to save a life that was otherwise be lost. But think of it from a productivity standpoint of an employer or the country. Think of it from an insurance standpoint, right? They end up paying less for life and health. Think of it from a hospital's revenue courtesy, right? So very early on, we realized that there was a professor at INSEAD called Andre Kalman. He's one of my mentors and he continues to be a well-wisher for the company. He said,
00:29:23
Speaker
to all of us, prop, if and prop and class, that if you can in life align incentives properly, that means that everyone wants you to exist and ready to pay money for that, right? You will succeed. When we started pitching to hospitals and to employers and to patients, we realized one thing, everyone, and literally everyone wants an ambulance to arrive faster. There is no one standing up and saying, you know what?
00:29:50
Speaker
It's okay if an ambulance rides 10 minutes late. So we said, okay, if we partner with multiple hospitals that enables us to respond faster, patients benefit, employers benefit, insurance benefits, family benefits, country benefits, all I have to do is figure out monetization. And honestly, that was
Monetization and Service Quality
00:30:06
Speaker
the easiest part of it because everyone was ready to pay us. So today we get paid by the employer, by the patient, by the hospital.
00:30:13
Speaker
Just looking at the hospital arm of it, I'll come to the other arms. So to the hospital, you charge for responding to calls and doing the triaging or also for managing the logistics. Do you have your own ambulances or did you take the ambulances of the hospital and equip them with GPS devices and then just coordinate on the pickup? We take over the hospital's ambulance. We put our technology on that. We bring them onto our network.
00:30:42
Speaker
Then for every two hospital ambulances, we put five of our own on the network. Remember, problem number one, too many ambulances, but problem is not enough of good quality. So what we said is, okay, the asset-like model is I'm going to take over existing inventory, qualify it and
00:31:00
Speaker
tech enabling, but I'm also going to put my own inventory in place because if the patient is calling a medanta or a polo or four days, patient expects the clinical quality of that hospital, but hospitals are often unable to deliver that because they don't have a control outside the hospital. But if we are able to be the flag bearers of clinical quality outside, then they will trust us more. So we started actually going slightly acid heavy on that.
00:31:25
Speaker
So say, Midanta might have had a fleet of say 50 ambulances which you would have taken and then you would have supplemented those with 100 more of your own. And then what would you charge Midanta? Like you would charge them for that 6 cost also? Or like how would the commercials work out here? Because they are giving some of their ambulances, you're using some of your ambulances. So Midanta is not a client as yet. So perhaps I can use this as a business development tool.
00:31:54
Speaker
Yeah. So let's say Fortis and Bangalore. So Fortis and Bangalore has two ambulances that they've given to us. And we've given them a network of 200 ambulances in Bangalore. And what happens now? Let's say we answer the evidence equal. That's a SaaS product. It's a pool subscription. Then we variableize their fixed. What they were spending on those two ambulances, we variableize it. So we charge for a patient.
00:32:18
Speaker
And then as the number of cases because of the better response to up, the incentives that align because hospital likes that I charge them only when I break the patient. And then I am also responsible for doing all the outball transportation at the hospital. So that's where we also use the hassle and the utilization goes up because imagine if you're a hospital ex in India, right? And you have two ambulances and you run the emergency room. What is your biggest insecurity that if I send this
00:32:47
Speaker
Ambulance to draw a patient back to their home or to another hospital. Next time an emergency call comes, I'll not have an ambulance. So every hospital's ambulance system is a cost center. And we are talking about a lack plus hospitals, right? There is not a single hospital and I have surveyed thousands. There's not a single hospital that transits ambulance as a profit center. The day we come in, it becomes a profit center.
00:33:12
Speaker
Right? So, number one, that's an incentive line. Number two, we start reaching patients faster. So those patients who would have gotten missed to a neighboring or competing hospital now actually end up coming. Number three, we are able to now use the same ambulances that they were unable to use for outbounds. We are able to use them for both inbound and outbound, increasing the utilization of the network. And we do this at scale. So it's very tech enabled, smart model, or going and telling hospitals
00:33:39
Speaker
You do not know how to run ambulances. We apologize. You do not know how to answer emergency calls because that's not your focus area. We do it at scale. Why would you not give it to us? When we reduce your cost, we make it into a profit center. We increase patient pickups. We decrease the ETA. And at the same time, we take your brand everywhere. And why should Akshay and ambulance be parked inside the hospital? It has zero relevance. It should be parked outside the patient's home, right? Predictably.
00:34:07
Speaker
but a hospital has an ambulance parked inside the hospital and we take these hospital ambulances and we set them free. So these ambulances would join your network and be used for any hospital or they would be used only for that hospital.
00:34:23
Speaker
They are used within constraints. So why did I say that we put our own ambulances on top? Because we don't want hospitals inventory to be a pooled inventory. Because when a medanta's ambulance goes to pick up fortices patients, it leads to confusion and bad brand experience. So what we do is that if the next hospital's ambulance is not the nearby, a red ambulance will go, not five hospital's ambulance. So it's a logistics with constraints building. So you had some out of funding.
00:34:53
Speaker
which would probably not have been enough to really invest in ambulances and all. So how did you go about building it? I think that was the most interesting part of the early days. We were certain what we wanted to be. We had this ambition to become the 911 of India. But the first visit that we did, we went to an ambulance operator and we said, hey, we have an app.
00:35:15
Speaker
Would you want to join our journey and become a supplier on the platform? So you're saying that the way you have these taxi fleet services, there are also these ambulance fleet services? In India, there is no regulation that limits anyone from becoming an ambulance operator. So actually you can come tomorrow and buy an ambulance.
00:35:38
Speaker
of the like that you want. That means that you can buy Aurtiga, you can buy Inova, you can buy anything, put the stretcher inside it and become an ambulance operator. And the fancier the name, the better the J-A-M-B-E, Srinivasa, Akshay ambulance, you can be whosoever you want. So in India, we have
00:35:54
Speaker
a huge number of ambulance operators with an ambulance holding off. And you have fleet operators also, like people who have 50 ambulances or like that kind. It's rare for people to scale up to 50 because these are, what is the archetype of an ambulance operator? This person used to be a driver in the hospital.
00:36:13
Speaker
and then realize that why a driver in a hospital when i can actually play a part in transporting dead bodies or transporting patients from one hospital to another so he buys an ambulance and becomes an ambulance operator and because he has contacts inside the hospital he gets those cases right so we went to a we went to one
00:36:32
Speaker
operator and we asked him to join us on the platform. And this guy used to stand outside the hospital and he asked us what our plan is. And we said that we want to give you more cases by partnering with either hospitals or by partnering with employers or by launching this app. So we were at that time still figuring out our GTM. And I still remember what he said.
00:36:58
Speaker
And I said, oh my God, why this resistance? Because normally Indian Altric is very open towards increasing their business through platforms like ours, right? We think we see that with Uber, then we see that with Appom Clap, which was just many of these stories we started to hear about. And I was really surprised that these guys are so anti. And we faced a lot of resistance from ambulance operators to come to the platform.
00:37:23
Speaker
And at that point of time, with our limited learnings, we didn't know why. And as we realized this, we also used to open the doors and the stench would hit us, the quality, the bed sheet would be bloodstain. And we'd be like, Antoine was my co-founder, right? French guy. He said, Hey, bro, I didn't leave France and graduate from NCR to do this, man. We didn't want to aggregate this supply or this quality of supply. So.
00:37:50
Speaker
We started brainstorming and then we decided, why don't we do one thing? Why don't we just lease an ambulance? We go to the best operator and we say, hey, if you have any additional ambulance available, would you mind leasing it to us? We've just come and the fortunately we found one and we branded it as stanplus. Today our operating brand is red.health. Red ambulance is our consumer brand, but at that time we just branded it fundamentally as stanplus.
00:38:15
Speaker
And we said, what is the next best thing that we can do? Since we knew the hospital is where the demand and the supply is, but we didn't know how to partner. So we said, yeah, with the least we could do is if someone dials for an ambulance or just dial this, you'll get the lead. Yeah. Searches for an ambulance or Google looks at the car, just dial, we'll be the ones. Gave us a steady trickle of cases, three to five cases a day. And that ambulance started running. We created our own assistance center, three, four people. We made them sit 24 hours.
00:38:44
Speaker
And something very interesting happened. One hospital in Hajjabad where a lot of patients used to end up through that ambulance that we had, this hospital didn't have a good ambulance system. So people would arguably
Hospital Partnerships and Operational Efficiency
00:38:56
Speaker
search on Google to find this hospital and find us. And the hospital actually said, you know what? We've been receiving really good feedback about your ambulance service. And would you mind getting officially partnered with us and running it for us?
00:39:12
Speaker
We said, what does that mean? They said, every time we will at the hospital get a call, we will send your and we said, I mean, we knew the pooling happens, but we were like, hospitals actually actively outsourced. So here's then what we did. We took another vehicle and we attached it with that hospital. And every time hospital used to get an incoming call, we would send this ambulance.
00:39:34
Speaker
And then because the ambulance was parked there, our driver used to give us a call and say, Kesar, a patient has come. They are getting discharged tomorrow. They come from Vijaywada to Hyderabad for treatment and now they want to take the patient back to Vijaywada. But the patient can't go in a taxi or train. They want to go back in an ambulance. Can we send our ambulance? And again, it was a discovery moment, aha moment for us that our ambulance is parked there. And can we actually send it to Vijaywada?
00:40:02
Speaker
But the hospital said, no, you can't send this ambulance to Vijay Vada, but you can send any of your ambulance. We don't mind. We don't monetize that outgoing discharge. So then we basically started partnering with hospitals, telling them we will do a phenomenal job in managing your involves.
00:40:17
Speaker
If you give us, if you allow us to monetize your outbounds and the revenue is 10 is to 1 is to 9. So in India, your listeners will know if they are hearing this. Next time that you go outside a large hospital, see you will have a bunch of ambulances parked outside. They don't serve the purpose of bringing patients into the hospital. They serve the purpose of taking patients from the hospital to their home or to another hospital.
00:40:42
Speaker
That's the monetization in India. We don't run an ambulance system in India. All these operators that I spoke to you about, the Jambay and the Srinivasas, etc. They are there to take patients from hospital to another hospital or from hospital to their home. And because medical migration in India is such a big thing, people come to big cities, from small cities. Reverse transport is also a big market.
00:41:06
Speaker
Okay. And so what would you charge to this? This would be like a standard shelf rate for people who want the outbound traffic killer. Absolutely. So it was a fixed rate construct that we brought into the hospital. We said, we'll set up a small office inside your hospital and we will charge fixed prices for outgoing. So whereas the hospital would earlier deal with a guy wearing this big gold chain,
00:41:32
Speaker
Now they would do it with professionals who give transparency or pricing, which is tech enabled, people can pay with credit card. Then what happened is one of the hospitals actually said, we went to them and we presented the data to them and we said, look, your inbounds are really low as compared to other hospitals. Are you not getting calls? Why are you not firing these ambulances to pick up patients?
00:41:52
Speaker
So these guys said, hey, we've been trying to revamp our call center for a while now. We have been unable to. And being founders and being scrappy founders, wanted to make money, however we could. We said, we run at the system center already where we answer by then from three, four calls, we had gone to a few hundreds. We said, would you by any chance be interested if we bring your calls into our assistant center?
00:42:17
Speaker
and answer these calls. Keeping in mind, we already have the deck to run your ambulances and we already control your ambulance. This way we can give an end-to-end solution to you. We will answer your calls. We will give custom greetings. We'll take care of your ambulance. And because we have a network available in case your ambulance is busy, we can always use one of ours. And hospitals have something very interesting because I would have given it for free.
00:42:38
Speaker
Hospitals said, how much would you charge? I said, oh, and I gave the first number that came to my mind and they accepted. So that's a great thing for a father to learn, right? That when your first offer gets accepted, my negotiation professor used to tell me, that means that you've got a shitty deal and you left money on the table. You split the difference. So then we basically kept increasing now. Hospitals pay us a couple of lakhs, sometimes over 10 lakhs to run this efficiently for them, because at an average revenue per patient of 2 lakh rupees.
00:43:07
Speaker
When we get into a hospital, we take the inbounds 3x, right? If someone is doing 40, 45 per month, which is one, one and a half patients, right? One and a half patients a day, we can take it up to four or five patients a day, right? So that's that incremental hundred patient is what grows for them. Right. And your pricing is like performance based pricing or number of calls based pricing or number of agents based pricing.
00:43:34
Speaker
It's flat pricing. It's value-based pricing. So it's not cost-based. It's value-based because it's a pooled system. We don't want to tell them we have 30 people, 80 people or one person. In the end, we give SLAs that we will answer 99% of calls. We will have case completion rate of 92%.
00:43:51
Speaker
And we will answer every call in under two seconds. It's SLA. If we don't do that, we give them money back. Because again, first principle is simple. There must be some difference in pricing. What is that? Is it number of calls that the hospital receives or won't? It's the number of beds that the hospital operates.
00:44:08
Speaker
That's the metric that decides how busy your hospital is. And so once we did this, we did this in one hospital, then we stretched to do another three and we were always this dichotomy of growth versus are we going to kill people? And, you know, not a very tough answer, but not if you're an investor, that company and you have to show growth. But honestly, we had some amazing investors and they said, do it properly, do it nicely. Bring those modes around the business so that you can't get copied. Right. And that's what is happening.
00:44:38
Speaker
We focused on clinical quality, we focused on making sure that our customers are treated well. And because we are not asset light alone, right? When we take over ambulances from hospitals or if we operate for them, we are arguably not asset light, but we are experienced, right?
00:44:54
Speaker
And experience rate is always going to win over asset rate. I always say this, if you have experience, you will win over asset rate. Asset rate may scale or arguably seem to be a model which has more supply available. But over time, supply, large supply does less to you than
00:45:14
Speaker
focused demand that is loyal. We've seen with Oyo, right? Huge supply everywhere. You don't see Oyo's branding anymore. And because they had huge supply, that didn't ensure that they succeeded, right? Today, I know no one in my friend's circular families would ever book in an Oyo. Not because we can afford better, but it's just that supply doesn't really matter. What matters is that it's the experience, right? And this is how we build, right? We said experience, right? What does that mean to our patients? What does it mean to our customers?
00:45:43
Speaker
And it meant the following SLAs, reach in time, go in full, be able to manage the long-tail scenarios, right? Hospitals are generally equipped to manage the curves, the bell curves, right? They're able to manage an average case very well. But the movement law of the deal happens. That's where they refer the patient to a specialized center.
00:46:03
Speaker
But in case of lockdown in ambulance, right? Those cases, let's say twins to be transported or 300 kg percent to be transported, right? Long tail cases, as I call them. If you're building up capabilities to be able to manage these extra complicated cases that require precise handling, that's where we've built our reputation because we started answering calls. We were able to get all the cases in. We got that data in.
00:46:29
Speaker
We partnered with Super Specialty Hospital. So we got the, we earned our spurs by doing complicated cases. And because we were experiencing not asset lights, we were able to build standardized supply. And now as we raised money, they are increasingly going towards the paradigm that says ambulance should reach in eight minutes and it should be free in emergencies to the patient hospitals today at the backend are paying us to transport patients, right? So we can make it three for the patient.
00:46:55
Speaker
And there is a reason for it. Transaction adds two to two and a half minutes to the overall experience, right? And if we take out the transaction layer from this experience and we have our monetized link to insurances, employers or hospitals rather than the patient, we believe that patients will trust us more.
00:47:15
Speaker
They will be able to deliver better on time. And at the same time, incentives are aligned because my driver is not thinking of taking to one hospital or another. This is what it is going to get paid, etc. Whether they transport 30 km or 1 km. Time does not take this decision, machines do.
00:47:33
Speaker
But still, India is a country that requires monitoring, right? We've seen what has happened with Uber, Ola, where they want to go a certain distance, et cetera. So we've basically said we've taken it out of a driver's hand and we've made it free for the patient so that we are making it free. It's not free everywhere. We are piloting it. And the way it will be done is that eight minute ambulance is free. Of course, we have partnered hospitals who take care of that. Right. And we just want to reach on time, reach in full and transport to the right destination.
00:48:03
Speaker
That is amazing. Tell me something. How did you build a competent call center? Because this is not customer service when you have a standard script that is relatively easier to build. There would be so many things requiring specialized knowledge. If someone says that I'm getting chest pain, then you probably need to ask questions and then decide. How did you build that competence in your response center?
00:48:32
Speaker
I was reading recently, some entrepreneur, a founder of a unicorn, essentially said it was Lenzka. And Mr. Bansal said, to the world outside, it looks like you sold everything, but internally, and I am paraphrasing it, not Virgatin, but internally, you're like, oh man, so much to do, everything is breaking apart, right? So outside in, we are really good. Inside out, I sweat bullets that one day a case is going to come, that's going to, you know, rip the experience apart. We took five, five and a half years
00:49:02
Speaker
to reach to a stage where health care funds, health cord, health x, Kalari Capital, these guys took notice and said, these guys are doing something magical. And it was me personally getting involved in almost every case for a year for two years monitoring the experience myself. And then for two years subsequent, making sure that every customer feedback that comes
00:49:30
Speaker
I personally take interest in call the customer, see what went right, what went wrong. So I think the privilege that I had as a founder was that I was allowed to deep dive into every experience and build it. If I were a manager, perhaps I wouldn't have been able to do it, but because I came top-down with so much interest,
00:49:52
Speaker
in doing things right.
Continuous Improvement and Future Plans
00:49:55
Speaker
And because I was a pharma plus MBA, the science plus business, I did all build up their strategy. I studied and work with global leaders. I came in and I said, yeah, if you have to do this, we'll do this properly. So there is no easy answer to this. There is no right answer to this. It took time.
00:50:17
Speaker
We are not there yet. We are only 10% of the experience that we want to deliver inside of them. But outside in, if you talk to hospitals, if you talk to our enterprise clients, all the largest companies in the country, as for them, we are doing better than 99% of other people who they have partnered with for similar services in the past or current. So I think the paranoia of a founder makes experiences better because we are never satisfied.
00:50:46
Speaker
At the same time, we are in a space where feedback comes very strongly. Yeah. If you screw up, then you'll immediately hear the complaint. There have been a few times where I've gotten feedback that you killed my relative and imagine waking up to that and imagine how earth shattering it is.
00:51:08
Speaker
for your mission to hear that and then you deep dive and you realize that perhaps you made a mistake, perhaps you didn't. But if the customer is blaming you, they have a good reason to be angry. So how do we learn from that? How do we overhaul the system? And it's a lot of moving parts.
00:51:28
Speaker
But patients are not supposed to know that. Our hospitals don't bring us in because they think that it's complex. They know it's complex. They know it's tough.
00:51:39
Speaker
They know they don't have their best people running this. And yet they know that there's an agency, there's a startup led by people who are perhaps today the best in the country running an emergency service. And they trust us to do this day in, day out. And it's, it's a daily meditation. There's no other way to build the experience that we want to deliver. And I reiterate.
00:52:01
Speaker
Inside out, we are 10% of what our ambitions are. Outside in, we are perhaps 99%. And how do you ensure quality at the ambulance level? So do you have some sort of a training for the drivers you hire? Or are these like specialized drivers? Tell me about that. Absolutely. Each and every individual that we hire goes through multiple rounds of training.
00:52:23
Speaker
on the job training and then continuous training. We take feedback from each and every case that we manage. We are doing blank audits. We are doing case audits. We are doing scheduled audits. Every day we use the checklist manifesto. Every ambulance goes through a checklist and pre-case, post-case, start of the day, start of the shift. So now we are adding a lot of technology to the entire process.
00:52:51
Speaker
whether it is inventory, whether it is medical equipment, whether it is the vehicle itself. And the idea being that if we have to deliver consistently an experience in eight to 10 minutes, then turbines need to be minimized. And it's not only on time, it's also in full. That means that there is no use of having an ambulance that does not then have the right medical equipment, medicine, surgical equipment, or say oxygen.
00:53:17
Speaker
that is needed to transport the patient. So it's on time and in full. And for us to deliver that, I'm going to take a quick moment to compare with, say, what Blinkit and Zeptos of the world are doing. They are creating dark stores, limiting the variability by decreasing the SKUs, and then making sure that in very dense, urban environments, they have enough people on the platform to be able to go quickly to the dark store where someone is packaging those limited SKUs and then the person is delivering.
00:53:47
Speaker
And by the virtue of this person delivering in a neighborhood, this guy actually gets to know who the security staff at one apartment complex is. So he gets that priority. He knows how to enter, et cetera. So with that learning, the time gets saved. But the most important thing is.
00:54:02
Speaker
they actually have to create those dark stores and put SKUs inside. In case of an ambulance, our dark store is the product as well. It moves. Ambulance is the dark store. Imagine that you have a very fast dark store that instead of a delivery boy, the entire dark store could come to the patient or come to the customer and then hand over a few things. So you could carry all those SKUs with you. This is what we are doing. We are essentially saying,
00:54:27
Speaker
Look, if we have a qualified, personal, great hardware and amazing software connecting everything together, all we need is density. And since we have so many hospitals, employers, insurances and ecosystem partners relying on us, utilization will be taken care.
00:54:45
Speaker
So instead of one ambulance in Bandra catering to one hospital, now we have two ambulances in Bandra taking care of seven hospitals. So the response time will be faster because instead of one, you have two now and also demand will be better channel. Asset utilization will be better. And because familiarity comes in, off routes, off addresses, we'll be able to respond better. And if you are able to make sure the man and the machine speak to each other, we will be able to deliver consistently. That's what we are building.
00:55:14
Speaker
So we spoke about the hospital tie up. Tell me how the first employer tie up happened and what is your pricing like with employers or like with hospital, it is number of beds. So how does it work with employers? Give me some more details of that.
00:55:26
Speaker
With employers, one thing that we do is we charge them on the number of employees and approximate geographical requirements spread. And however, it's not an exact science. So we do it more as slaps. One thing that we don't do is we don't put a limit to how many calls can someone give. Like many teleconsult companies charge saying we give you 2,000 teleconsults. In case of emergency, sometimes patients speak to us eight to 10 types.
00:55:56
Speaker
So we essentially say, look, unlimited calls is the paradigm. We will charge you a fixed fee per month that covers our fixed costs. And our job is to make sure that as many people as possible call us because underlying, we are the ones who are also running the response, right? So the secret sauce is that we want those ambulances to be better utilized.
00:56:16
Speaker
So we are able to give employer subscription and give unlimited number of calls so that more and more people use the supply that we have. Now, what differentiates us from everyone else is that there aren't many employer facing healthcare companies that offer emergencies, but then they come back and they want to integrate with people like us, right? But we have both the assistance and the response layer.
00:56:41
Speaker
We are full stack there. So we are always able to better deliver experiences than anyone else. You also serve as a like a inquiry or information help desk. Like someone wants to know that I have a fever, what medicine should I take? Like stuff doesn't need them to go to a hospital. 100%. That's triaging. We are a triaging, treat and transport platform in emergencies.
00:57:06
Speaker
So, people will call in and say, we get weird requests, man. It's very, very weird. So, our neighbor needs a kidney transplant. Can you please tell us where should we go? How can we get kidney transplant? Because the trust level that comes in, right? Because imagine you're an employee of a large company. The company said, if you call your number, they will help you. It's your concierge. It's your personal health concierge, right?
00:57:31
Speaker
And now, most of the other companies are boundaries. I only do teleconsult or diagnostics or I do this, right? And it's app-driven, so all the workflows are fairly defined. And here, the company is saying, in this number, call and ask what your heart desires. You want mental health? We have it in bits. You want teleconsult? We have it in bits.
00:57:49
Speaker
Now the patient calls in, they are not getting the right advice. So they say, I am Amazon. My company has given me this number. Let me call this. And we say, this is for Amazon. How can we help? Because it's unlimited calls and we don't really care about, we don't need any data from the patient, right? They say, which is the best hospital. Now let's take a step back.
00:58:13
Speaker
get to a 30,000 view of things. Remember when we say that we run emergency centers for hospitals? Gator to those calls already. We already know from our database, which is the best hospital for what? Hence, we are the best people to give that advice as well. So we are building our network and our supply with the hospitals and with our own ambulances. And then enterprises rely on us to use that entire network that we've built. And it becomes like a bot asking questions. And we
00:58:39
Speaker
going back and using our LMS and knowledge base to essentially say, this is the best doctor, this is the best hospital. And by the way, if you need help in getting appointment there, getting transport there, or air ambulances, we can get it up for you. You use something like a Zen desk or some sort of a knowledge base tool. We use fresh dense care.
00:58:59
Speaker
In the entire history of the company, we've only raised $2 million before this round. And last year, we were profitable at EBITDA level and at PBT level. And we are not talking small revenues. We are talking millions of dollars of revenue. And the cases that we've done over 2,000,000 cases, we answer thousands and thousands of calls every day. We are partnered with 50 plus hospitals. The brand that you trust is the brand that trusts us.
00:59:26
Speaker
And currently we are partnered with almost 100 employers and we want to scale it up to 200 in the next year. And the contract sizes are becoming larger and larger. We will be with over 100 hospitals by the end of this year in 15 cities by the end of this year. So I'm talking calendar year.
00:59:43
Speaker
We are with our drivers, our paramedics, our assistant center put together. We are over 700 employees. And an important metric that we track is we owe 15% of the total ambulances that we have on the net. These 15% ambulances do 70 to 75% of trips at any given point of time. And they generate 30 to 35% of revenue. So really our system is optimized for one kilometer, two kilometer cases.
01:00:08
Speaker
and that case back to Assam or that case to Vijay Vada is all done on our partner ecosystem. So we give high value, high percentage commission out to our partners and we do higher beta margin cases, high contribution margin cases on our own system. Our system decides which outlets to go. So it's a system that's actively scaling up. We have more hospital and employer demand actually that we can service today.
01:00:32
Speaker
and we are lining them up for growth because the need is so apparent, the market is so clear in terms of they want this, they need this, they will pay for this and what we want to do is we want to make sure our experience is ranked and we don't want to dilute our experience by growing too fast.
01:00:51
Speaker
What revenue are you targeting for next year or what will this year close at? I think we'll be in the very near future. We are targeting to be at least between 50 to 75 million dollars of revenue. And if this doesn't happen over the next 24 months, then we failed in our objectives.
01:01:12
Speaker
What is the likely split according to you? How much will come from the employer side? How much will come from direct-to-consumer? How much will come from the hospital? The subscription? I'm currently tracking at almost 50-50 subscriptions and incidents. As a founder, that's great because it takes care of my working capital.
01:01:33
Speaker
But as we scale up, of course, there will be, we want the incidence business to grow faster than our subscription business because we build our brand there. Red Ambulance going in front of you creates a lot of brand. It's a moving brand. So we want to make sure that the incidence climb up, but subscription is a healthy cashflow that we love. So it's a stable cashflow. So if we can maintain it at 50-50, there'll be then be a great plan that has been executed, but
01:02:01
Speaker
I think if incident is faster, they are happy as well because every time our ambulance moves, it creates a brand. Okay. Okay. And so for the D2C player, how do you plan to do your customer acquisition? It's using every channel that's available today to a direct-to-consumer company. Our old app integrated into other healthcare apps and making sure that we are using digital well, out-of-home well.
01:02:27
Speaker
partnerships. So in terms of direct-to-consumer, our mission is very clear. We want to be first minute, last mile.