Why Bessemer is swimming against the PE tide in India healthcare

Bessemer Venture Partners, a US-based venture capital and private equity firm, believes that India’s next-generation healthcare platforms will be built not as large, multi-specialty hospitals but as scaled, standardized single-specialty chains.

It predicts the organized single-specialty segment will grow from $4.4 billion in 2025 to $12.3 billion by 2030; This represents a compound annual growth rate of 22%; that rate is more than twice as high as expected for multispecialty hospital chains and the broader healthcare provider industry.

Central to Bessemer’s thesis is the expectation that category leaders in single-specialty care will acquire smaller clinics to expand their footprint. By contrast, after a decade of aggressive growth, multispecialty hospitals are under pressure to improve productivity, said Nithin Kaimal, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. Mint.

“The ability to maximize average revenue per surgical bed and optimize average length of stay is becoming extremely important,” Kaimal said, adding that this is pushing them to focus on the most complex procedures that require multiple specialists.

Bessemer estimates that average revenue per operating room increased from $241 in 2015 to $625 in 2025, while average length of stay decreased from 5.1 days to 3.8 days.

But change is taking place in an industry that already attracts significant amounts of private capital. Industry estimates cited in Bessemer’s own investment thesis presentation put cumulative PE investment in offline healthcare providers at $10.6 billion between 2015 and 2025.

This deck includes many that are shaping the space, including Blackstone Group’s $591.1 million investment in Quality Care in 2023, Baring Private Equity Asia’s acquisition of a majority stake in Indira IVF for $656 million in 2023, Temasek Holdings’ acquisition of an additional stake in Manipal Health for nearly $2 billion in 2023, and KKR’s acquisition of a majority stake in Kerala in 2025. It indicates a big deal. Meitra Hospital.

maneuvering area

Despite this, Bessemer maintains there is still enough space.

“If you look at the dollar, most of the private capital has actually gone into the multi-specialty sector,” Kaimal said, pointing to the number of listed hospital chains such as Apollo Hospitals, Max Healthcare, Fortis Healthcare, Narayana Hrudayalaya and others. “It’s still very early in the single-specialty spectrum,” he added.

Bessemer is known for its support of internet companies in India, but it is now taking a bigger step into offline healthcare delivery. In a new roadmap for single-specialty care, it invested $24 million in NephroPlus (dialysis) in 2021, $13.8 million in Pluro (IVF) in 2025, and $31 million in Sukino (continuing care) in January, hoping that several category leaders can scale to national platforms and achieve exits through public listings or strategic sales. NephroPlus was listed on exchanges in December 2025. ₹875 crore IPO

It is investing in a dedicated India vehicle it announced in 2021 and also recently closed $350 million for its second India fund to support founders from the early stages and beyond.

In his investment deck, Bessemer estimates that establishing a single-specialty center could require about $0.1 million for a dental clinic to $4.2 million for an oncology center (the most capital-intensive specialty he tracks), while annual revenue potential at maturity spans a similar range, from roughly $0.1 million for dentistry to $7.1 million for oncology.

Kaimal said Bessemer typically supports single specialty platforms early in their deployments, so it doesn’t set a fixed target for how many centers a chain should add upfront, preferring to see the model work in the first few locations before starting to expand.

He added that the execution path is rarely linear, with some centers misfiring even on powerful platforms.

“Of course, you’re going to make mistakes along the way… There’s going to be the odd clinic here or there. You can never have every center perform at the highest EBITDA margins… Once you do it right over and over again across dozens of clinics, the math generally evens out,” he added.

Easier said than done

But, experts He warned that healthcare doesn’t scale like the consumer internet playbook.

Saurabh Singhavi is director and chief operating officer of transaction advisory firm Alsisar Impact Pvt. Ltd said the biggest risks are quality and trust, especially for doctor-directed brands that may be vulnerable in an economic downturn. “With these types of single-specialty brands, the face of the business is often a single doctor, and their reputation tends to trump everything else.”

If the quality of care is not at the desired level, such ventures cannot survive, he said, adding that such businesses are largely built on results and word-of-mouth marketing, not on customer acquisition tactics commonly used on the consumer internet.

This trust dynamic is also why investors want to track more than investment spending and return on investment measured solely by production volume. Beyond patient volumes, rigor should consider turnaround time and how teams manage patients throughout the care journey, he said.

Investors should also consider qualitative maintenance measures, he added. “If you can’t do the maintenance part, it’s very difficult for this type of business to thrive.”

Dr. is a physician-entrepreneur and partner at A Square Capital. Arindam Basu said Bessemer’s single-specialty roadmap risks being too “singular” and “linear” for an industry where models routinely evolve to survive.

He argued that India’s first wave of specialty and super-specialty hospitals generally did not remain specialties for long. Many of the cardiology-focused hospitals, such as Fortis Escorts in Delhi, Asian Heart Institute in Mumbai and the former cardiac-focused Fortis Cunningham Road facility in Bengaluru, eventually converted to multi-specialty formats to capture a larger market and diversify revenues.

“The only specialty categories that do best in India are those with predictable, repeatable unit economics. Eye care has performed extremely well and arguably still remains the country’s best story,” Basu added.

Bessemer’s thesis ultimately boils down to World War II, when sharper pricing and broader insurance adoption could expand the market, even as referrals from general practitioners remain a major driver of demand. and III. He said it would be tested in tier-1 cities.