Lightrock India has made an investment of $15M and acquired a significant stake in Sukoon Healthcare, a psychiatric inpatient unit based in Gurgaon. The investment is to date the largest in the Indian mental health space and is the seed transaction towards creation of India’s largest therapeutic behavioural health platform.
The mental health burden of India is large with an estimated 200 million people in India suffering, 1% of whom are expected to require inpatient services. However, there is a severe shortage of specialists to provide care, with only an estimated 10,000 psychiatrists and 1000 clinical psychologists practicing in India. Patients therefore have limited options with over 90% not accessing any form of quality care.
Vidit Bahri and Kanishk Gupta founded Sukoon in February 2020 to empathetically deliver evidence-based care to patients. Sukoon uses a multi-disciplinary team of experienced psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, counsellors and vocational therapists to ensure that each patient receives personalized and holistic care. Additionally, the hospital environment is carefully designed to facilitate the care journey. In the last year, Sukoon has treated over 11,000 patients suffering from a spectrum of conditions across inpatient and outpatient services.
Post this transaction, Saleem Asaria, partner at Lightrock India, will assume the role of Executive Chairman and Vidit and Kanishk will assume senior leadership roles. Saleem has previously founded and built Europe’s leading behavioral health services company.
Vidit Bahri and Kanishk Gupta, said “We are excited to be working with Lightrock India and Saleem to build on our vision. We have always believed in putting our patient care and experience at the center of our protocols and have achieved recognition for the leading services we provide in Delhi. We are currently expanding our services to Bengaluru and Mumbai as a first step of a pan-India programme of scale.”
Saleem added, “As India grows to become a large economy built on the strength of its human capital, we believe that behavioural health is an important and pivotal sector to address towards building a large and healthy society. Sukoon, together with the existing ecosystem, capital and specialist expertise, both national and global, can help create one of the leading mental health systems in the world. This investment is a first step towards realising our vision to build India’s first and largest therapeutic behavioural health platform.”
