After exiting Flipkart, Mukesh and Ankit team up for healthcare startup play

Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori, the two high-profile former executives of ecommerce major Flipkart, are back in the business as they teamed up to launch a new startup venture in the healthcare and fitness space. According to a report in the Economic Times, the new venture will see an investment of $5 million with separate focus on both fitness and healthcare space while having a strong technology backbone, even as the product remains at least six-nine months away from launch. [caption id=“attachment_2692280” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Ankit Nagori and Mukesh Bansal[/caption] “Both these categories are extremely fragmented. What we are trying to build is an integrated solution,” Mukesh Bansal was quoted in ET. However, both of them are yet to find an investor for their proposed startup. The move seems to suggest the growing trend among the urban people who are willing to spend huge bucks on health and fitness in today’s highly stressful world. In the US, startups like ClassPass run monthly subscription programmes for fitness classes across gyms and studios, which have received huge investor interest. Stressing on his new initiative, Bansal said his start-up venture is not directly related to the growing trend in the US and China, as his concept would revolve around helping people manage and track their health. “Be it preventive check-ups, keeping a history of one’s health records, or things like health insurance, we would look to address all these for the consumers,” he said. While the duo plans to register the company next month, they will launch an app sometime next year. The hiring process for getting engineers onboard has already started, a DNA report said. The report quotes Nagori saying that there’s a need to connect players, referees, coaches, communities to form communities. “This is one opportunity but we have to figure out if the underlying infrastructure is good enough or not. If not, we might have to start building out infrastructure also,” he added. Earlier Nagori and Bansal, following their exit from Flipkart, were expected to launch two separate enterprises, but they later decided to come together to initiate a common goal. In early February, e-commerce giant Flipkart announced that Mukesh Bansal, Head of Commerce Platform, was leaving the company, ending his two-year stint which he described as “nothing short of a fairy tale.” Also, Ankit Nagori, Chief Business Officer, Flipkart, also put in his papers to start his own venture. The move came just weeks after Flipkart underwent a major restructuring at the top deck, which saw Binny Bansal being promoted as the Chief Executive Officer and Sachin Bansal as the Executive Chairman. Before this, Mukesh Bansal had successfully built the fashion commerce portal Myntra, which he sold to Flipkart in 2014. Recently, Amazon-backed home services provider, Housejoy, announced that it has acquired Orobind, an ‘at-home’ personal fitness tech startup for an undisclosed amount. As a mobile marketplace of fitness coaches Orobind assigns experts based on the user’s location, preferred workout time, and preferred workout days.