Why the Thyrocare founder wants a bite of the crowded dental market

A. Velumani, the man who built Thyrocare into one of India’s most efficient diagnostic chains and exited at close to a billion-dollar valuation, is back in builder mode. Not in diagnostics, but in dentistry. And not as a passive investor, but as an operating mentor with a stopwatch in hand and a disruption thesis in his pocket.

For the startup world, Velumani has lately become something of a folk hero—the scientist-turned-entrepreneur scaled with frugality, exited at scale, and now dispenses tough love to founders chasing growth without profits. At founder events, product launches, and television studios, he draws crowds that treat him less like an investor and more like a business philosopher.

But with his latest venture—a national dental platform being built under the AVM Smiles banner—Velumani is putting his own ideas back on trial. AVM Smiles is more than a side project, with the mentor once again becoming the operator. It is a live experiment, a test of whether his core doctrine can still produce breakout scale in a more crowded era.

A different playing field

Velumani’s new initiative is very unlike his original diagnostic business. When he started Thyrocare, there weren’t many labs with scale and having a diagnostic chain wasn’t even an idea in the Indian market. Dental chains, however, are a reasonably large business today, and to that extent, he is trying to get into a market that isn’t nascent anymore.

“Healthcare businesses have come a long way since Thyrocare started. So, it will be tough to emulate the same success that Velumani had in selling his first business,” G.S.K. Velu, founder and chairman of Neuberg Diagnostics, observed.

The landscape Velumani is entering is crowded with established names, refined playbooks, and battle-tested competitors—a far cry from the blue ocean he once navigated.

Velumani is entering a crowded field of established players and battle-tested competitors—a far cry from the blue ocean he once navigated.

The afterlife of an exit

Velumani’s journey as a biochemistry PhD who built Thyrocare by focusing narrowly on thyroid testing, slashing prices, building a B2B (business to business) model, and scaling through franchise collection centres rather than expensive company-owned networks is well documented. His approach was radical for its time: simplify, specialise, scale. “What is simplified is understood. What is simplified is sold. All challenges in business are because of complications,” he told Mint.

Velumani insists his entry into entrepreneurship was not born out of a grand design but from constraint. He focused only on thyroid because that was his academic strength. He priced low because he didn’t fully know how to cost high. He built franchise channels because chasing payments himself was inefficient. What later looked like strategy was actually survival. “All that I did was totally unconventional… I didn’t have an option,” he recalled.

When Velumani sold Thyrocare at a valuation that brushed a billion dollars, it seemed like a perfectly timed exit. In the years since, however, listed diagnostics peers such as Dr Lal PathLabs, Metropolis and Vijaya Diagnostic have achieved higher market capitalisations. Some observers argue that Velumani may have sold early.

He has responded candidly in conversations: the valuation was attractive, and personally he was entering a different life phase after his wife’s passing in 2016. Velumani thought he was done running companies. He wasn’t.

What followed was an unexpected second career—as investor, mentor, and increasingly, as a public voice for capital discipline in a startup ecosystem addicted to burn.

Stealing the spotlight

At a recent electric scooter unveiling in Bengaluru by startup Simple Energy, something unusual happened. The scooters were sleek, the tech specs impressive, but rather than look at the electric vehicles (EVs), many in the crowd gravitated toward one early investor. Velumani found himself surrounded by founders and young operators seeking five minutes of blunt feedback. The hardware could wait; the hard truths could not.

His advice to the founders of the EV company was characteristically unsentimental: don’t cling to equity if capital is needed to survive and scale. “Raise funds, even if you lose your equity. Getting funds is a must. Because you can’t grow your company and protect your personal selfish interests at the same time,” he said.

Velumani draws sharp distinctions between what he calls pull products and push products—products customers actively want versus those that require heavy marketing spend to move. “If the customer pulls it, you don’t have a customer acquisition cost. If he has no need, you have to push it. Why do you amplify losses? People think loss-making will become profit-making once scale comes. No—you may die if scale comes without profit.”

That clarity has made him a natural fit for television. On Star India’s entrepreneur reality show Bharat ke Super Founders, hosted by actor Suneil Shetty, Velumani sits among a pool of investors who have committed ₹100 crore to back emerging businesses. Contestants pitch; investors commit; Velumani diagnoses.

The entrepreneur says he finds himself repeating three words so often that co-judges tease him about it: Review. Reset. Restart. “You have priced it too much—review. You haven’t packaged it correctly—reset. You have 200 SKUs but profit comes from 10—restart,” he said.

Velumani has also surprised fellow investors by occasionally backing founders without taking equity—if the idea aligns with his broader mission of improving efficiency and affordability. His stated ambition is no longer just to build companies, but to build entrepreneurs. “Me becoming successful is not the goal. It is leadership that has impacted or disrupted inefficiencies,” he said.

Yet even as his mentor persona grows, Velumani has been quietly preparing for a return to hands-on scaling.

Dental disruption bet

Velumani’s current obsession is dentistry—specifically, a Mumbai-headquartered chain called Orthosquare, which is being rebranded and expanded under a new national platform called AVM Smiles. The founders, Kunal Shet and Riddhi Rathi Shet, built over 100 clinics through a largely company-owned model. Velumani wants to change the engine mid-flight.

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“Company owned, company operated (COCO) is not scalable. Franchise owned, franchise operated is scalable,” he said.

The arrangement itself is unusual. Velumani is not putting any capital into the chain. Instead, he earns a 4% share of the topline revenue as a mentoring and brand fee. He offered debt support if required; the founders declined, saying the business generates enough cash. His contribution is the operating system: cost discipline, procurement scale, pricing strategy, franchise architecture, and brand trust.

“This business doesn’t need money. It is brand management, software management, transparency,” he said.

The targets are bold: 1,000 outlets by 2030, and a headline-grabbing plan to open 100 clinics in a single day. Velumani is already deeply involved, flying in regularly to review rollout plans and franchise structures.

Shet describes Velumani less as an investor and more as a mindset shock. “He has completely changed the model. In a COCO model you are very controlling. Franchising is like a rented person in your brand—your mindset has to first change,” he said.

Velumani’s thesis is that dentistry today resembles diagnostics of the 1990s: fragmented, underutilised, and overpriced due to low throughput and ego-driven infrastructure duplication. “In a dental clinic, the chair is empty for 21 hours, busy for 3 hours. That is inefficiency. Wherever there is inefficiency, I see opportunity,” he argued.

Dentistry is just one example of what Velumani sees as a healthcare landscape riddled with inefficiencies waiting to be addressed. He points to billion-dollar opportunities within healthcare in specialized areas that need to be disrupted, citing fields such as urology or gynaecology, which may not appear as obvious targets but nevertheless offer tremendous potential in a country like India.

Velumani’s playbook is familiar: drive utilisation, centralise purchasing, standardise processes, push prices down by 30–40%, and let franchisees earn enough to stay motivated. Shet says the chain is already focused on higher-value procedures such as implants and aligners, and on backward integration in manufacturing—areas AVM Smiles will scale further.

“Eighty percent of the procedures give 20% of the money. Twenty percent of the procedures give 80% of the income. We focus on that 20%,” Shet said.

A tougher arena

Still, this is not the same landscape Velumani disrupted three decades ago. Organized dental chains already exist at scale. Large ones such as Clove Dental, which has over 500 locations, and Sabka Dentist, with 200 outlets, have spent years refining processes, absorbing losses, and tightening operations. Yet despite being in business for over 15 years, both have remained largely local businesses confined to a few states. Sabka Dentist, for instance, operates largely in the western markets after starting out in Mumbai in 2010.

The franchise model itself is more contested and more complex today than when Thyrocare began expanding.

Dr Ramani Ramamoorthy, a Chennai-based dentist with over four decades of experience, has a word of caution: “The dental chain business, as with any other business, will be driven by targets and profits. While there is a lot of efficiency that can be had by running chains, dentistry is still a local business that runs on trust. So, there are a lot of moving parts before a scaled business can make money.”

Yet some industry observers believe the opportunity remains substantial, even if execution will be harder. Said Sujay Shetty, director at PwC: “If Velumani has a national dental chain in mind, there is a good opportunity there. And also, there is enough room for more diagnostic services—the market isn’t saturated yet.”

If Velumani has a national dental chain in mind, there is a good opportunity there.
—Sujay Shetty, director at PwC

Shet himself argues that it is early days in the dentistry business in India, pointing to a lack of awareness about overall dental hygiene. He says there is a huge opportunity in the business that makes it an interesting problem to solve.

Some healthcare entrepreneurs caution that what worked in a nascent diagnostics market may not translate cleanly to modern dentistry. Franchisees are more sophisticated, competition is tighter, and margins are more visible.

Velumani acknowledges indirectly that markets evolve—noting that after his exit, diagnostics companies quickly raised prices once the low-price pressure he exerted disappeared. “All my competitors increased rates… Now again there is enough room to disrupt—not because I charge less, but because I build efficient systems,” he reiterated.

Later this year, Velumani’s non-compete period in diagnostics ends. He has made it clear he intends to return, this time targeting segments of testing he believes remain inefficient and overpriced. “I am ignoring that one-third of the menu I already disrupted. I will focus on the two-thirds yet to be disrupted,” he said.

In the startup circuit, Velumani is often treated like a finished case study. On Saturdays, in suburban Mumbai dental offices, he is laying the ground for a new one.