Synthera Biomedical, a Pune-based medical startup has raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from equity crowdfunding platform 1Crowd and government’s Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC).
Nilay Lakhkar, founder and chief executive of SynThera Biomedical, said, “The investment will help us achieve expansion, approvals, and launch of our first line of bone graft substitute products in the market, together with further development and testing on our patented bone graft product line,”.
Synthera Biomedical was founded by Dr. Nilay Lakhkar in 2015. It aims to be India’s first and foremost company to indigenously research, develop and manufacture glass and ceramic products for healthcare and other sectors.
Two products developed by the company, widely used in the healthcare sectors are SynOst and PoroSyn. These are synthetic bone graft substitute products made from bioactive glass. These are used in dental and orthopedic surgeries as implants to repair and regenerate the damaged bone.
BIRAC’s Sustainable Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development (SEED), this scheme was set up to support life sciences startups, providing a funding of up to ₹30 lakhs.
1Crowd is a unique crowdfunding platform focused on connecting investors with some early-stage startups showing a lot of promise. It was founded by Anil Gudibande and Anup Kuruvilla in 2015. It has already invested in more than 17 ventures with ₹40 crores. It also provides an ecosystem that has a lot of experienced mentors along with over 500 angel investors.
NITI Aayog had recently launched National Health Stack Infrastructure that will look after the implementation of central governments flagship Ayushman Bharat programme along with other public healthcare programmes in a bid to strengthen the public healthcare of the country.
Indian healthcare market is pegged at ₹6,88,000 crores ($100 billion), which is expected to reach ₹19,20,000 ($280 billion) by 2020, according to a report by IBEF. There is an immense opportunity for growth and more startup are bound to enter this space. Other known startups involved in the healthcare sector are Forus Health, it makes ophthalmic imaging device along with Consure Medical, its products are used for the management of faecal incontinence in bed-ridden patients.