Healthcare-focused venture capital (VC) fund W Health Ventures on Tuesday said it achieved a final close on its second investment fund with ₹700 crore in commitments.
Pankaj Jethwani, managing partner at W Health Ventures, told Business Standard that the second fund exceeded its earlier target of ₹630 crore, and the fund plans to invest in eight to 10 healthcare companies.
The money is expected to be deployed as seed funding across healthcare startups incubated by W Health Ventures, under a company creation fund model.
“We would not write cheques to existing startups. Instead, we will exclusively focus on company creation. That means taking an idea, working on it for 12 to 24 months and pressure testing it,” Jethwani said.
He added that once an idea or concept is prioritised, the fund builds a founding team around it, followed by launching and bringing it to scale.
While W Health incubated only four to five companies as part of its first fund, it aims to focus the second fund exclusively on company building.
The venture has already started deploying its second fund, having seed-funded Everhope Oncology, which was founded alongside Narayana Health in March 2025. It has also invested in United States (US)-based tech-enabled mental health platform Everbright Health.
“We have already built two companies under the second fund, and a third one is coming up soon,” Jethwani said, adding that the fund will have a four-year investment period with a target of two to three companies a year.
He added that limited partners (LPs) in the second fund include family offices and institutions in both India and the US that are interested in the Indian healthcare space.
Having based the first fund in the US, W Health’s second fund has been registered as a Category II alternative investment fund (AIF) with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi).
The VC fund usually invests ticket sizes between ₹30 crore and ₹50 crore, targeting first-to-market single-speciality healthcare solutions.
“A lot of our work has happened in single-speciality, and we continue to be interested in that theme largely because we are a problem-focused fund,” Jethwani said.
Terming it a good business model, he added that single-speciality helps in building capital efficiently, with lower capital expenditure.
Going forward, the venture fund aims to focus on two themes — using artificial intelligence (AI) to bridge India’s healthcare supply-demand gaps and building India into a healthcare superpower for the world.
Jethwani added that the latter would include backing AI-enabled healthcare services that can develop full-stack solutions for global markets.