Ola’s first employee Pranay Jivrajka starts up Allo Health, raises seed round
Pranay Jivrajka, the first employee of cab aggregator Ola, has started up his own venture Allo Health, which focusses on sexual wellbeing for men. The venture has already raised $4.4 million in seed funding led by Nexus Venture Partners and counts some of India's leading founders and startup operators as early investors.
Apart from Nexus, Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, Pranav Pai (3one4), Kalyan Krishnamurthy (Flipkart), Sujeet Kumar (Udaan), Ankit Bhati (Amnic/Ex Ola), Deepinder Goyal (Zomato), Rohit MA (Cloudnine), Gaurav Munjal (Unacademy), Nitin Gupta (Uni Cards), Kunal Shah (CRED), Sandeep Singhal (Nexus), Tarana Lalwani (InnoVen) and others also participated in the round.
The Bengaluru-based startup will be assessing one’s sexual well being and look at end-to end treatment. Starting from assessment, consultation with doctors, home delivery of medications, scheduling therapy sessions, follow ups, home tests, the platform will be providing all of these services.
The company would be relying on artificial intelligence and machine learning along with qualified doctors to assess the patients accurately. The startup has currently onboarded three doctors.
"Sexual well-being has a lot of heightened social stigma and hypersensitivity associated with it. These combined with limited focus on sexual education in formative years, low accessibility to qualified doctors, lack of awareness, and a patriarchal mindset leads to many individuals suffering in silence," wrote Jivrajka in his company's blogpost.
Speaking to Moneycontrol, Jivrajka, added, "The idea is to serve this under-penetrated market. With the funds, we would now be looking at scaling the operations and make inroads into the markets." The company is currently a 13-member team and is looking to hire aggressively across roles.
Some of the handful of players in the niche market include MyMuse and Formen, which sell sexual wellness products. Another player - Mosaic Wellness - which runs Manmatters and Bodywise, also operates in the same segment and raised $24 million last year led by Sequoia Capital India.
Prior to starting up, Jivrajka worked with Ola for almost a decade and headed Ola Foods from 2017 till early 2021.
Last week, Moneycontrol reported that Ola's co-founder Ankit Bhati will be launching a new startup called Amnic in the software as a service (SaaS) space along with former colleagues Satya Nagarajan and Nimish Joshi. Further, Sequoia Capital is likely to invest $15-$20 million in the startup as part of a seed round.
Jivrajka's move to start up again also comes at a time when Ola and its Electric Vehicle venture Ola Electric are battling multiple issues - from a spate of top-level exits to delayed deliveries to poor customer feedback.