Lightrock India on Wednesday announced that it has made an investment of $15 million and acquired a significant stake in Sukoon Healthcare, a psychiatric inpatient unit based in Gurgaon.
According to the company’s statement, the investment is to date the largest in the Indian mental health space and is the seed transaction towards the 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 percent 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 percent 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,” the company stated.
Post this transaction, Saleem Asaria, a 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, it stated.
“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,” Vidit Bahri said in a statement.