In 2008, Shashank ND was trying to do something that sounds simple. His father needed knee surgery, and the family wanted a second opinion from a physician in the United States. That meant sending over medical records. In India, those records lived on paper, in folders, in the hands of whichever hospital had last seen him.
It was a small, maddening errand, and it stuck. Shashank was still at NIT Karnataka, Surathkal, studying information technology alongside Abhinav Lal, a batchmate who was the better coder of the two. The two of them looked at the problem and concluded that the whole system lacked a digital spine. They skipped the usual route of campus placements to build one, working at first from Shashank's father's modest three-bedroom house in Bangalore.
The two of them looked at the problem and concluded that the whole system lacked a digital spine.
The first idea, a way for patients to search for doctors, ran straight into a wall. Doctors had no online schedules, so there was nothing to search. In 2009 the founders pivoted to Practo Ray, software to run a clinic: appointments, billing, records. Then came the hard part. Doctors had low digital literacy, were wary of software that made their billing and taxes visible, and did not adopt anything on their own. The pair built a field sales force and sold door to door, a feet-on-street operation that was slow and costly.
That grind turned out to be the moat. By the time Practo.com launched for patients in 2012, thousands of clinics were already on the system, and Sequoia's India arm backed the company around then. Tencent led later rounds of $90M in 2015 and $55M in 2017, and the company grew into a platform for booking, consultations, pharmacy and diagnostics.
But growth got loose. Practo wandered into fitness subscriptions and hardware, burning capital before pulling back to its core. Pharmacy discount wars squeezed margins, and the company chose not to match them. COVID brought a surge in teleconsultation and a clearer legal footing with India's 2020 telemedicine guidelines, yet losses stayed heavy: an operating EBITDA loss of ₹162 Cr in FY22.
The discipline came late but it came. By FY25 Practo reported an operating EBITDA profit of ₹15 Cr on ₹234 Cr revenue, with GMV near ₹3,500 Cr. In 2025 former COO Jagnoor Singh took over as CEO while Shashank became executive chairman, and Abhinav Lal moved to chief scientist, as the company prepared for an IPO that has been promised since 2023 but not yet dated.
The lesson sits in the first year. Practo did not start with a grand marketplace. It started by fixing the unglamorous supply side that the marketplace depended on, and it paid for that with years of knocking on clinic doors. If the thing your idea needs does not exist yet, you may have to build it yourself first.