About five years ago as more and more consumers went online for their day-to-day requirements like banking, shopping and so on, a clutch of founders was looking to take health services online as well. Their pitch: Replace your general practitioner with a video call with expert doctors available round the clock on an app.

The first few years went into fine-tuning the software and dealing with regulatory bodies. Then Covid-19 opened a window for these upstarts just as demonetisation did for the payments industry.

Players such as Practo, MFine and Lybrate all tried to tap into this opportunity, raise funds and scale up. 

Meanwhile, DocsApp, which started around the same time, announced a merger with MediBuddy in June 2020.