Shorooq invests in India's Impact Guru
Source: MENAbytes
Indian healthcare crowdfunding platform Impact Guru has raised an investment from Shorooq Investments, the Abu-Dhabi based firm announced today. Some GCC-based angel investors also participated. Earlier this year, Impact Guru had announced raising $2 million Series co-led by by Apollo Hospitals Group, Asia’s largest and most trusted healthcare group and Venture Catalysts, an Indian incubator.
Founded in 2014 by Piyush Jain and Khushboo Jain, the platform makes it easy for anyone to raise funds online for their medical expenses that are not covered by insurance.
The traditional way of doing this is seeking contributions (as a loan) from family members and return the money at some point. But for some very expensive medical procedures, raising money from family members sometimes is not enough and that’s why every now and then we keep seeing calls-for-donations on Facebook and other similar platforms, where people are collecting money for medical treatment of their loved ones.
Impact Guru is basically making all of that very easy. Anyone can contribute to the calls/campaigns for donations, which makes things convenient $50,000 from 100 people, including your family, friends and other generous donors is way easier than raising the same amount from five close family members.
And you obviously don’t have to think about paying back the money as the money provided is not a loan.
Since launching, the helped over 15,000 patients to crowdfund in last 4 years and mobilized over $20 million across 15 countries.
Impact Guru makes money by charging a fee between 5% to 12% of the total money raised.
After raising this investment, Impact Guru now plans to expand into GCC, starting from UAE. The region hosts 7 million Indian expats and more than 15% of donations on Impact Guru that originate from outside of India come from GCC.
The startup is looking to partner with with private hospitals, clinics, healthtech startups, and NGOs to accelerate its GCC entry and scale its operations. Impact Guru will ensure full regulatory compliance in each jurisdiction in which it operates, said the statement.
