Innovaccer co-founder and COO Sandeep Gupta describes an early pivot in its business strategy as a stroke of serendipity. This was no ordinary shift, mind you: the SaaS startup, which offered data and analytics solutions to corporations then, walked away from its biggest clients. 

How and why did this happen?

Until early 2015, Innovaccer managed all its sales and delivery from India. Gupta later moved to the US, its primary market. After several meetings and pitches, he won business from the likes of Harley-Davidson, Walt Disney and Wolters Kluwer. He also signed on Innovaccer’s first healthcare customer, Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI), Iowa.

The organisation, which runs a network of medical facilities, wanted to unify its fragmented datasets of electronic health records (EHR), insurance claims and pharmacy and lab reports on a central platform with patient-level mapping. 

Gupta and his team executed this project for far less than what their established competitors would have charged. More crucially, the project drew their attention to the huge potential in healthcare, prodding them to plot a new course. In late 2015, the startup decided to focus only on this industry, leaving sectors and clients which accounted for 80% of its revenues.

“I still remember that when I went to break it to Wolters Kluwer, an SVP paraded me around the office floor, telling others: ‘This is the first guy who has come to fire us’,” Gupta recounted with a chuckle.

Many people on the outside were initially puzzled by Innovaccer’s move to become a data platform for healthcare. So, did the San Francisco-based company, which became a unicorn last year, get it right?