After 10-minute grocery delivery, a 15-minute ambulance service grabs investor interest

• StanPlus has raised $20 million to cut down its response time from 15 to eight minutes.
• It has raised an additional $2 million from Grip Invest for leasing ambulances.
• The company has a network of 3,000 ambulances, of which it owns 200.

The ten-minute delivery service made all the noise in the latter half of 2021 with Swiggy, Grofers (now Blinkit), BigBasket and Zepto jumping on the faster delivery spree. The segment did become wilder when big gun Reliance Industries decided to jump into this segment by acquiring a quarter of Dunzo’s business.

Critics, however, rightly questioned whether 10 minutes delivery service was the absolute need especially at the time when the country is going through the worst humanitarian crisis of all time.

Well this may offer a solace to them that StanPlus — a healthtech company that offers 15 minutes ambulance service — has raised $20 million to cut down its response time to eight minutes.

The company also plans to use this capital to work with over 500 hospitals across 15 metro and Tier II regions of India — including Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Jaipur and Ahmedabad — in the next 18 months. It has raised an additional $2 million from Grip Invest for leasing ambulances.

Founded by Prabhdeep Singh, Antoine Poirson and Jose Leon in 2016, StanPlus works with the hospitals to manage their emergency response and offers ambulance services as soon as possible.

It offers software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to the hospital and helps a hospital manage all their emergency responses. It charges these hospitals a certain subscription cost.

“The big question is why should hospitals run their own call centres or their own transport systems? They don’t have their best people doing that job. During COVID-19, an average hospital responded to about 30% of their emergency calls. Non-COVID they answer over 65%. Our answer rate is 97% in under two seconds,” StanPlus’s cofounder and chief executive (CEO) Singh told Business Insider.

StanPlus also helps the callers get quick response by connecting them to the nearest possible ambulance. The company has a network of 3,000 ambulances, of which it owns 200.

The company’s Series A is a mix of equity and debt led by Healthquad, Kalaari Capital, and HealthX Singapore, Pegasus (Hiranandani family office), Avaana Capital’s Sandeep Singhal and serial investor Prashant Malik. The debt funding was raised from N+1 capital and Caspian.

Prior to this, the company had raised $2 million in its five years of operations.

The delay in ambulance services continues to be a major pain point of the Indian healthcare system. The average ambulance response time in India is 45+ minutes and that leads to a greater risk for a patient's life, Singh said.

“The reason for me doing this is because I live in Hyderabad and my parents live in Chandigarh. It really worries me sick that one day there is going to be an emergency and there won't be a response system available for them. So the reason we are building this and the reason we are scaling it so quickly, so that you know we can save all our parents as and when they have an emergency in the near future,” Singh added.

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