RED Health’s ambulance business is struggling to scale

In the past year, the Hyderabad-based startup doubled its workforce to expand. Now it is letting hundreds go as it faces harsh ground realities.

Antoine Poirson, Jose Leon and Prabhdeep Singh, who studied together at business school INSEAD, saw the gap in the ambulance service market in India and founded RED Health (then StanPlus) in 2016. 

Their problem statement was simple: On average, an ambulance takes about 45 minutes to reach a patient in India. The startup—based in Hyderabad and led by Singh, a former pharmaceuticals executive, as CEO—rolled out with this proposition and slowly scaled up over years, raising a $1.2 million seed round in early 2020. 

The COVID-19 pandemic followed shortly and the company’s business boomed, with revenue growing 2.9x to Rs …

Author

Samiksha Goel

Samiksha covered all things startups at The Morning Context. She joined us from The New Indian Express, where she wrote stories on the retail and food sectors. Prior to that, she had covered startups and written various business features in the Deccan Herald.

Writer

samiksha@mailtmc.com

Bengaluru