Healthcare-focused venture capital firm W Health Ventures on Tuesday announced that it has raised nearly $74 million (Rs 700 crore) in the final close of its second fund, exceeding its initial target of Rs 630 crore.
Fund II had raised Rs 550 crore in the initial close in February this year.
The fund plans to build and back 8-10 healthcare companies from the pre-idea stage to category leaders over the next four years, the firm said in a statement. It will invest Rs 30-50 crore in each venture.
“We build companies to solve these seemingly impossible problems, the ones that actually need first-to-market solutions, because that’s where population-scale change lives,” said Pankaj Jethwani, Managing Partner at W Health Ventures.
“We’re not importing a Silicon Valley playbook and hoping it works here. We go to the parts of the healthcare system where the structural mismatch is the highest, and we stay with that problem for a year, sometimes longer, chipping away at it before we build anything. Our approach is that of mining diamonds, not competing in a gold rush,” he added.
W Health Ventures operates as a healthcare company creation fund, with an in-house team of physicians, operators and technologists. The team identifies gaps in healthcare delivery, evaluates opportunities over 12-18 months and then works with founding teams to build and scale companies, the statement added.
“We don’t hand a founder a cheque and a good-luck wish,” Jethwani said. “A founder is not stepping into a startup. They’ re stepping into something we’ve ideated, designed and derisked through 18 months of diligence before day one. That’s the whole thesis of our Second Fund: do more of that, faster, and do it across the US-India corridor as well as inside India.”
W Health Ventures has begun deploying capital from its second fund. Everhope Oncology, the first company from Fund II, is a national oncology platform founded with Narayana Health to reimagine cancer care in India. The fund has also invested in Everbright Health, which is scaling advanced interventions for treatment-resistant depression in the US.
Founded in 2020, W Health Ventures funds healthcare companies addressing critical unmet healthcare needs. The firm’s portfolio from the first fund include Nivaan (chronic pain), BeatO (diabetes), ElevateNow (obesity), BabyMD (paediatrics), and Mylo (parenting) in India, along with cross-border companies like Wysa (AI mental health services) and Reveal HealthTech (AI transformation services).
All Fund I companies have raised external growth capital.
