HealthifyMe to launch online store this quarter; CEO Tushar Vashisht rules out IPO plans near term
HealthifyMe had raised $30 million in a pre Series D funding round led by LeapFrog Investments, Khosla Ventures, FinnFund and Van Lanschot Kempen in the first week of June. There were eight investors who participated in the latest funding round and the company is planning to use the capital raised to power its product suite with Generative AI. Tushar Vashisht, a former investment banker and a University of Pennsylvania graduate founded HealthifyMe in the year 2012.
Vashisht in a freewheeling conversation with Mint spoke about the company's IPO plans, its AI-powered nutritionist Ria, global expansions and his upcoming musical concert. Edited excerpts: Layoffs at HealthifyMe were done to build a profitable and sustainable business and it wasn’t because we were in a cash crunch by far. Initially all of 2020 and 2021, we saw such tremendous growth and availability of capital that we were indexing really heavily just like other startups.
But post pandemic that wasn’t the case and the world ecosystem was prioritising profitability over growth. We had the funding too not because of cash constraints but there’s a pretty insane opportunity with Generative AI which I think is once in a lifetime and I want to make sure that I capitalise on it.
The fact that we are a market leader in India and the fact that we are already being sustainable and profitable combined with this opportunity we are chasing allowed us to build the capital. I wouldn’t say that raising capital was a herculean task in our case.
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