VC-backed HealthKart buys sports nutrition e-shop MadeinHealth.com

By Sonam Gulati

  • 21 May 2012

Bright Lifecare Pvt Ltd, which runs online health store HealthKart.com, has acquired all assets of health nutrition e-store MadeinHealth.com, for an undisclosed amount. As per the agreement, HealthKart has acquired the domain name, inventory, database and its Facebook page besides few key employees of the two year old startup Blue Lion Group Services which runs MadeinHealth. Apparently the deal was struck in March though a formal announcement was not made until now.

In a related development, horizontal ecommerce firm Yebhi has roped in the co-founders of MadeinHealth. MadeinHealth was co-founded by Jatin Modi and Maniraj Juneja in 2010. These two will be joining Yebhi’s crew as vice-president of the Business Strategy team.

In a statement Yebhi said it has brought in the team at MadeinHealth in a cash cum stock deal. It did not share further details but a source privy to the development told Techcircle that Yebhi has roped in the duo with a $4 million bounty through a mix of cash (joining bonus) and stock of Yebhi.

When contacted Modi declined to comment on the deal but said the duo will be involved in looking for new ventures that Yebhi can acquire.

Why was MadeinHealth sold?

MadeinHealth is engaged in e-tailing of various health nutrition products including bodybuilding supplements and general health nutrition supplements.

Modi told Techcircle.in, “We were doing very well for the past 2-2.5 years. We were a self-funded company and had done a business of Rs 2-2.5 crore of business since inception, which being a bootstrapped venture is a decent number. The main problem which surfaced recently was of capital inflow and thus we chose to sell it to HealthKart.”

“Amongst many potential buyers we chose HealthKart since they had a very clear vision for MadeinHealth and they decided to keep the original brand name and domain,” he added.

Both the founders hail from engineering background and have been involved with family business prior to starting MadeinHealth.

On being asked about the new role at Yebhi.com Modi said, “As an entrepreneur, one always has ten more ideas to work on, but currently we are very excited to work at Yebhi. They were one of the buyers we interacted with when MadeinHealth was to be sold and we were very impressed by the team and synergies there. We look forward to being a part of the team.”

HealthKart’s plans for MadeinHealth:

“We are good at e-commerce and have a strong backend, we wanted to make these available to a website like MadeinHealth that has a good reach,” said Prashant Tandon, co-founder and MD, HealthKart.

He told Techcircle.in that MadeinHealth brand and domain name will be retained and HealthKart is now looking to add new features like health blogs, articles, diet tips, fitness videos etc.

“We will make MadeinHealth a one-stop shop for fitness enthusiasts and will be adding adjacent categories that will make sense. In addition to existing sports nutrition products, which are currently available on MadeinHealth, we plan to soon introduce other nutrition products viz vitamins and minerals, specialty nutrition etc, and related sports products viz fitness accessories, available on the site. We will also enable free diet counselling for MadeinHealth customers, which we currently offer to HealthKart customers via our trained nutritionists,” said Sameer Maheshwari, co-founder and MD, HealthKart.

Incorporated in March 2011 by Maheshwari and Tandon, HealthKart is an e-tailer of nutritional products besides sports & fitness equipment, personal care, beauty and eye care, parenting, fitness apparel, etc. It recently raised $7.5 million from Sequoia Capital and Omidyar.