Sukino’s $31 million round signals shift toward post-hospital care

Sukino, who runs non-hospital recovery centers, had previously made a suggestion. ₹50-crore Series A round led by Stakeboat Capital in 2024, following angel funding from family offices of Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan and Aarin Capital chairman Mohandas Pai.

Sukino operates non-hospital recovery centers in Bengaluru, Kochi and Coimbatore and is profitable at the group level, founder and CEO Rajinish Menon said. Mint.

The chain currently operates around 850 beds across 11 centers in South India, he said. The first phase of expansion with the new fund will focus on metros in South India before moving on to tier-I markets, he said.

Naming Calicut, Trivandrum, Mysuru, Hubli-Dharwad, Belgaum, Vizag and Trichy among the target markets, Menon said, “The first phase of investments will be to capture or build more of the metropolitan cities with Hyderabad and Chennai and then go to tier I cities of South India as well.”

Sukino plans to add 22 more centers in the next two years, Menon said, adding that most of the expansion follows an asset-light model in which landlords invest in construction and Sukino signs long-term leases.

Being light roadmap

Sukino is less of a ‘home care’ company and more of a hospital-like transitional care setup that kicks in after acute treatment and keeps costs lower than a hospital stay, Menon said.

“Acute care is still done by hospitals, but we’re beyond acute care. The idea is to expand into more clinical issues that we can take care of so that people can get a healthy basket of post-hospitalization care services,” Menon said.

Sukino’s round comes as more investors are testing bets in adjacent parts of the post-hospital and elder care market, which backs everything from home care and recovery services to consumer platforms for seniors.

In January 2025, private equity firm InvAscent invested ₹110 crore for a minority stake in Chennai-based Geri Care Health Services, making it the company’s first corporate fundraise.

Additionally, in 2024, non-hospital geriatric care provider Kites Senior Care, ₹While Ranjan Pai’s family office raised Rs 45 crore in its Series A round, senior-focused platform Khyaal raised $4.2 million in a seed round co-led by 62Ventures, SVQuad and Inventus Capital Partners in the same year.

Vishal Gupta, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, said the fund’s bet on Sukino was part of a broader initiative to build a portfolio of ‘single specialty’ healthcare companies backing firms such as dialysis chain NephroPlus and Pluro, a fertility platform that partners with independent In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) clinics.

He said Bessemer supports Sukino because he expects ‘transitional care’ outside hospitals to become more important as hospitals shorten lengths of stay and that improvement in the first few weeks after discharge can shape outcomes, especially in stroke, cardiac and complex orthopedic cases.

Specialization thesis

The Series B round aims to fund Sukino’s next phase of scaling while maintaining a capital-efficient model, Gupta said. “This funds the company to acquire 800 to 3,000 beds,” he said.

He also said Sukino offers care ‘at a fraction of the cost’ compared to hospital beds, which works for both insurers and out-of-pocket customers and still leaves room for healthy margins.

Gupta also laid out a simple background view of how the model scales based on occupancy and length of stay. “On average, each patient ₹7,000 to ₹8,000 a day and staying for 50 to 60 days… so if you have 5,000 beds at a given occupancy rate, ₹“In the next few years, the company will achieve revenues of Rs 1,000 crore very quickly,” he said.

Mohandas Pai, chairman of Aarin Capital, said: Mint We think that the opportunity arises due to changes in both costs and incentives in hospitals. Hospital care has become expensive, and hospitals that make more money from procedures have limited incentive to keep patients to recover long after surgery is completed, Pai said.

As a result, longer-term rehabilitation and post-operative support is increasingly shifting to specialized facilities for what he calls ‘continuing care’, which can be cheaper for patients than a long stay in hospital.

Pai also said Sukino’s short-term playbook should be to dominate Bengaluru before diversifying further into other markets. He said Bengaluru will be the ‘dominant theme’ for the next two years as the company builds a meaningful market share in a large and growing market.

Regarding future financing, Pai said the company’s next phase of expansion will likely require leverage rather than just equity.

Using profitability

“Because this is a base of operations that you have to build…they don’t have any leverage. So, I’m confident that bank financing will come to them in the future, because bank financing only comes after profitability. So, this equity round helps them make sure that they have good equity to get more leverage to get bank financing, which will enable them to grow,” Pai said.

Venkat Subramanyam, founder and chairman of Veda Corporate Advisors, said Sukino’s fundraise worked well for investors because it was in a clear category (continuing maintenance) and showed unit economics in existing centers at a time when many scale businesses were still struggling to turn a profit.

Exceptional founder credentials and a strong marquee table also help build trust and attract the interest of many large investors, he added.

“The quality of the emissions table… resonated very strongly… so we managed to attract a very high degree of interest from the markets,” he added.

But industry watchers have warned investors against confusing continuing care with elder care; argued that the former is a clinical extension of hospital care for patients who still require active support but do not need to remain in a high-intensity hospital environment.

Some experts predict the category will likely attract more capital, but large-scale consolidation may still be in the early stages and smaller-scale acquisitions may be more likely in the near term.