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Seedfund, and Aavishkaar India MVCF, India’s leading early stage venture capital firms, today jointly announced an equity investment in Vaatsalya, a healthcare services startup building India's first hospital network in semi-urban India offering primary and secondary care services.

"This investment will enable Vaatsalya to create additional hospitals to provide much needed efficient and affordable healthcare services for a large number of semi urban and rural families across India." says Dr. Ashwin Naik, Founder/CEO, Vaatsalya Healthcare Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

Today, when the metros & urban areas are witnessing the mushrooming of corporate healthcare chains, basic healthcare is still very elusive in semi-urban and rural India. A commitment to bridge this gap in healthcare equity in semi-urban & rural areas formed the basis for birth of the very first Vaatsalya Hospital in the year 2005.

"Vaatsalya intends to build a nationwide network of hospitals to focus on primary and secondary care services for families by the end of this decade" says Dr. Naik. Vaatsalya’s socially relevant yet financially viable business model has been recognised with the BiD Challenge India Award for the "Best Business in the Established Category" for the year 2007. This was a global challenge conducted by Netherlands based organization, Business in Development.

"The opportunity to provide high quality healthcare services where it is needed most, while building a sustainable business is part of our core vision and we are proud that we are partnering with pioneers like Aavishkaar and Seedfund in this effort. Both Seedfund & Aavishkaar have a track record of funding ventures which provide promising and innovative solutions in the Indian Market and it was important for us to work with a partner who will share our vision." added Dr. Veerendra Hiremath, Co-Founder and COO of Vaatsalya.

Bharati Jacob, Partner, Seedfund added "Seedfund is very excited to partner with the highly accomplished team of Vaatsalya to build a low cost model to deliver high quality healthcare network, to serve majority of Indians residing in smaller towns."

P. Pradeep, Partner, Aavishkaar said "The Vaatsalya model demonstrates that commercial considerations and social impact can indeed go together. We’re really excited about this and hope to work closely with the company towards fulfilling their growth plans."

Bharati Jacob from Seedfund and P. Pradeep from Aavishkaar will join the Vaatsalya Board.

For our plan "Bridging the Gap in Healthcare Access" Vaatsalya bagged the first prize in the BiD Challenge India 2007.

The BiD Challenge India offers entrepreneurs the opportunity to develop and execute business plans for profit and poverty reduction in India. They also invite national and international financiers who are interested in filtered and quality double bottom line investments. BiD Challenge India is part of a worldwide initiative, called the BiD Network.

Launching for the first time in India, 153 proposals were submitted, of which 107 met the criteria. Each plans has have been screened three times by seperate professionals in India. 59 Round 2 participants were selected and 11 of them were invited to Bombay to present their plan on October 12, 2007.