Building India's Largest Maternity Hospital Chain - Cloudnine Hospitals ft. Rohit MA, Co-Founder

On this founder journey, we speak to Rohit MA, co-founder and CEO of Cloudnine Hospitals. It is a chain of maternity hospitals that's spread across 9 cities and has 20+ hospitals. We speak to Rohit about his journey, how he raised capital for the business, how he scaled and the focus on customer experience.

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Here's an episode outline: 

(03:39) - The Thesis behind starting a Speciality Maternity Hospital
(10:05) - The Pros & Cons of having experience in the industry you start your business. 
(14:29) - The Business & Economics of running a hospital
(22:24) - The Genesis of the idea of building a chain
(30:24) - The Investment required to setup hospitals and how Cloudnine raised capital for it
(43:21) - The Journey of Scaling Up & Building Processes 
(01:07:09) - Rohit's relationship with Money and how that's evolved 

Hello and Happy New Year! Hope 2022 is 100x better than 2021 for each one of us! At The Indian Dream, we’re excited to bring you business content that’s worth your time. And we’re kicking off 2022 with an amazing founder! We have Rohit on the show today, the Co-Founder of Cloud Nine Hospitals. 

For those of you who don’t know, Cloud Nine is a chain of Maternity hospitals. In fact, they were the pioneers of dedicated pregnancy hospital when they first launched in 2007. Since then, they’ve expanded to 9 cities and built more than 20 hospitals. Along the way, they’ve raised close to 500 Crores from investors like Matrix Partners, Sequoia, and True North!

We speak to Rohit about how they came up with the idea to build a speciality hospital when Multi-speciality hospitals were the norm, the economics of a hospital, their customer focus and the innovations that have come out of that. 

Here’s an example of one such innovation: If you’ve been a parent, you would know that back in the day, the cost of delivering a child through natural birth process vs a C-section were different with the latter being more expensive. This resulted in mis-aligned incentives where hospitals often pushed for C-Section, if when not needed, because they made more revenue. Cloudnine was the first hospital to standardize rates and improve the experience for the to-be parents. 

Just like this, they’ve done a bunch of innovations across the process of pregnancy as well as scaling operations. We talk to Rohit about his entire journey, inflection points and the learnings from building a large business in the healthcare industry!