Your virtual health companion

BIBHU RANJAN MISHRA

Bangalore, 11 October
HealthifyMe, a Bangalore-based startup that provides
wellness services on the cloud, began as an idea in the
mind of its co-founder Tushar Vashisht while working as
a volunteer for the unique identity (UID) project under its
chairman Nandan Nilekani.
Vashisht, a graduate from the University of
Pennsylvania and a former investment
banker, refined the idea by trying to under-
stand the food habits of Indians living on
~100 a day, and then built the application
HealthifyMe with Sachin Shenoy, a former
engineer at Googles research laboratory
in India. The application combines a nutri-
tion database with services from experts
offered on the cloud. It could disrupt the
way wellness services are offered in India.
In just over a year, HealthifyMe has
been downloaded over 30,000 times, a sig-
nificant percentage of them by paid users.
Its users include Google India Managing
Director Rajan Anandan and Gopal
Srinivasan, chairman and managing director of TVS
Capital Funds.
Available on Android, HealthifyMe allows users to
achieve fitness goals using smartphones. It has a database
of Indian food with nutrition and calorie information
and is supported in real-time by a team of doctors, nutri-
tionists and fitness trainers to advise on food intake and
exercises needed to burn excess calories.
When we started two-and-a-half years ago, it was a
very bold for any app to just focus on Indian customers.
Fundamentally, it was not possible to create a business in
the digital space targeting Indian consumers. But we
thought that two years down the line when our product
was ready, Indian consumers would also be ready to pay
for such a service, said Vashisht. The good news is that,
we are beginning to see that bet paying off.
In 2011, Vashisht quit his job in Deutsche Bank,
Singapore, to work with Indias ambitious UID project.
He started working in the business development and proj-
ect strategy team reporting to Nilekani and Bala
Parthasarathy, co-founder of Snapfish, an online photo
storage and sharing platform that was acquired by H-P for
around $300 million. Parthasarathy had, along with scores
of other techies and entrepreneurs, joined the UIDAI. I
joined the UIDAI thinking that I will work for the common
man. After working for a year-and-a-half without pay, I fig-
ured I had enough policy research but what
really mattered was to know how it felt to be
a common person.
It was then Vashisht and a friend,
Mathew Cherian, an MIT graduate, start-
ed the mission to first live on ~100 a day, and
then ~32 a day, the poverty line as defined
by the government. We realised that you
cannot track your basic food. When I was
living on ~100 a day, I could not track my
bisi bele baath(a Kannada dish) and dosa.
So we started building our first tool in a
deep excel sheet after noting down the raw
values of Indian foods, recalls Vashisht.
One of the many things the duo realised
was why Indians need more protein instead of carbohy-
drates. Their experiment got enough media attention in
India and abroad and Vashisht and Cherian were fre-
quently invited to give talks to academic institutions,
organisations and MPs. Interestingly, on every occasion
they found people wanted a copy of the excel sheet they
had created on the nutrition database.
Vashisht and his team then built a mobile app and
put the data in the cloud so that everybody could access
it. However, he realised that an app was not going to help
him monetise the platform. Human services on the cloud
gave it an integrated experience. A feature called Live
Track provides an idea about how many calories are burnt
when users start working out. The application has a voice
command system that can read out the calorie content of
food when asked. Additionally, users can click a picture of
the dish and receive details about its calorie content.
Tech start-up set to change wellness segment with cloud-based services
Available on Android,
HealthifyMe allows
users to achieve
fitness goals using
smartphones. It has a
database of Indian
food with nutrition
and calorie
information and is
supported in real-time
by a team of doctors