Lybrate is a Healthcare Startup that connects Doctors on the Phone.

“When I was working for Facebook, my job was to connect advertisers with people using Facebook as a platform,” says Arora, CEO, and founder at Lybrate. “I thought why not apply the same logic in health care and connect doctors and patients on a single platform.

”In 2014, Arora, an alumnus of IIT Delhi and Columbia Business School, put in his papers as a data scientist at the social networking site Facebook at Menlo Park in California after a three-and-a-half-year stint to start Lybrate, an online doctor consultation platform, in India, in 2015.

For Saurabh Arora, 37, giving up a Silicon Valley dream career to chase an entrepreneurial pursuit back home wasn’t a gamble. “It was a well-thought-out plan,” says Arora. “Entrepreneurship is not about passion alone. There has to be a method to the madness.”

Arora was not alone in his journey. He was joined by his one-time colleague at a media company and now a friend, Rahul Narang, 30, who is co-founder and chief technology officer at the health tech startup. An engineer from the YMCA University of Science and Technology in Faridabad, he was earlier a lead software engineer at Snapdeal.
Together, they launched Lybrate to allow people to communicate with doctors from anywhere, at any time, and discuss any health issue through text, video, and voice chat.

Lybrate works on the concept of an online out-patient-department (OPD), through which technology is used to improve accessibility to quality health care in the country. “We wanted to connect a patient sitting in Moradabad to a doctor in Mumbai,” says Arora. “Lybrate was launched to address the doctor-to-patient ratio in the country’s health care sector.”

In less than three years, Lybrate claims to have over 1 lakh doctors registered on its platform across the country and, on a monthly basis, there are over 6 million interactions by way of searches for doctors, health queries, patient-doctor communication, and appointments for doctor and lab tests booked on the site. It is among the go-to portals for health information for patients, and for health care providers. As much as 60 percent of the traction on the site currently comes from tier 1 cities, while the rest is from tier 2 and 3 cities. It also has the largest library of health queries and medical advice on its platform in India.
However, challenges remain. Many health care startups have entered the market in the past few years, but very few have been able to establish successful models so far. “The space is likely to witness a significant churn in the next few years with only those players emerging as leaders who are able to provide a substantial value proposition to patients as well as doctors,” says Monika Sood, co-founder and partner at boutique advisory firm Arete Advisors.

Arora and Narang have, perhaps, got the advantage of a head start. However, as Arora says, “It’s definitely not a cakewalk… ultimately it’s work. Whether you work for yourself or someone else, that shouldn’t matter. You should just focus on the quality.”