India’s healthcare and healthtech ecosystem has grown by leaps and bounds over the last decade, with digital healthcare solutions being widely adopted across urban and semi urban areas. At a time when diagnostics meant nothing more than taking a lab test at a clinic referred to by the doctor, Deepak Sahni came up with an unknown concept in India more than a decade ago- preventive diagnostics. Today, that business has grown to ₹3,000 crore, with Deepak having the conviction in his idea, even though no one believed him.
“When we started in 2015, we were told the market didn’t exist — that Indians wouldn’t pay for preventive testing, that home collection couldn’t work at scale, that diagnostics was a commodity with no room to differentiate. We disagreed on every count, and built anyway.
The defining decision was to pioneer something the industry hadn’t seen rather than compete inside an existing one. That meant building the infrastructure, the quality standards and the trust from scratch — eventually across 250-plus cities, with 22-plus certified laboratories and a team that genuinely believed preventive healthcare could reach every Indian,” Deepak explains.
Misplaced priorities
With time, preventive diagnostics has grown by leaps and bounds, but the broader healthcare sector has focused heavily on scaling its reach, while neglecting the deeper interpretation of data for individual patients.
“When I started, I believed access to data was the problem. A decade later, I understand that data without interpretation is just numbers. Millions of Indians now hold their blood reports — and most have no idea what those reports are actually telling them about their health. The diagnostics industry solved the access problem. It never solved the understanding problem,” explains Sahni.
This structural gap informed his decision to launch UN:BLOC, an upcoming venture aimed at tackling outcome-based care, highly personalized health delivery, and servicing the global Indian diaspora.
Solving unmet challenges over consolidation
For Deepak, addressing the unmet challenges in the healthcare sector trumps the conventional path of consolidating Healthians’ position in the market.
“Consolidation has never interested me. Honestly, I didn’t step away from Healthians to rest — I stepped away because something else had become impossible to ignore. Indian healthcare has genuinely progressed in the last decade: access has improved, diagnostics have gone mainstream, digital health has found its feet. But progress in delivery is not the same as progress in outcomes,” notes Sahni.
“There’s a category of questions this industry avoids — not because the answers don’t exist, but because the business models aren’t built to reward asking them. That gap, between what healthcare promises and what it reliably delivers, is where UN:BLOC begins.”
Mentoring founders
Beyond building UN:BLOC, Sahni has committed ₹100 crore over three years to mentor and invest in early-stage startups, particularly those operating across healthcare, D2C consumer brands, and core AI infrastructure. His investment philosophy centers on identifying founders who demonstrate an acute, problem-first focus rather than pushing premature solutions.
“Above everything, clarity about the problem. A founder who can say precisely what’s broken, why it has stayed broken, and why they specifically are the one to fix it — that’s rarer than people think. Most pitches are solution-first. The founders who earn my attention are problem-first,” says Sahni.
Advice to entrepreneurs
For first-generation entrepreneurs building in high-gestation, highly regulated sectors where credibility and long-term trust are non-negotiable, Sahni emphasizes execution discipline over short-term milestones.
“Don’t confuse launch with arrival. Founders pour enormous energy into the launch moment and not nearly enough into the two years after it. In trust-driven sectors, the launch is only your introduction — the real work happens when nobody’s paying attention,” advises Sahni.
Looking ahead, his vision for UN:BLOC centers on reshaping the core paradigm of how patients engage with healthcare systems. “The goal was never to build another successful company. It was to shift how healthcare is delivered,” concludes Sahni. “If UN:BLOC succeeds, the measure won’t be a valuation — it’ll be a change in how patients are seen: not as consumers to be managed across a lifetime of prescriptions, but as individuals whose conditions can be understood and addressed at the root.”
<p>The post Deepak Sahni: The Preventive Diagnostics pioneer mentoring startups to fix solutions first appeared on Hello Entrepreneurs.</p>
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