Ascent Health: the startup that went backward to move forward - ET Prime

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"As a young boy, I wanted to be a race-car driver. I was even the national go-karting champion for three
years in a row." Then, Siddharth Shah did what any logical Indian would: He enrolled for a degree in
engineering.

Turns out that the choice didn't blunt the thrill-seeker in Shah though. After engineering, armed with the
mandatory MBA from IIM, Shah decided to turn entrepreneur. And he chose an area that calls for a
certain degree of daring — for there are bold business plans, and then there's the plan to straighten out
India's byzantine pharma-distribution system.

According to industry estimates, there are 850,000 to 900,000 pharmaceutical retailers in India.
Supplying to them is an enormous network of 80,000 to 100,000 distributors. Compare that with China.
According to a DSB Bank report, the country had only 12,975 distributors as of 2016 — down from
16,300 three years ago. The top three Chinese distributors control around 30% of the market.

India’s bloated drug-supply mechanism is what Shah’s company, Mumbai-based Ascent Health and
Wellness Solutions (formerly Dial Health), wants to cure. On its website, the company says its purpose is
“to add some harmony among all the chaos [in India’s fragmented pharma-supply chain] and ensure
affordability of healthcare to all”. The Everstone Capital-backed startup is one of only two companies to
have taken on this task. The other one is Keimed, a company owned by the members of the promoter
family of Apollo Hospitals Enterprise.

Perhaps this is a calling that won’t speak to you unless you have the healthcare business in your veins.
“My father [Bhaskar Shah] started an ICCU in a private nursing home in the Mumbai suburb of
Ghatkopar in 1986,” says Shah, one of Ascent’s founding trio. “In 1999, he became the co-founder of
Asian Heart Institute. Since 2007, he has been the co-founder of Jupiter Hospital in Thane,” Shah says. “I
have seen him go out of his comfort zone of being a doctor to set up an institute. Having courage and
taking some entrepreneurial risk is what I have learnt looking closely at his career.”

Unlike most startups that begin with an idea at their core, the three friends who built Ascent — Shah,
Hardik Dedia, and Harsh Parekh, all graduates from Mumbai’s Dwarkadas J. Sanghvi College of
Engineering — wanted to become entrepreneurs first. Discover a business idea that works, and hustle.

(From left) Siddharth Shah, Hardik Dedhia, and Harsh Parekh, co-founders Ascent Health and Wellness
Solutions; image courtesy: ahwspl.com