If you’re new here, Eximius is a pre-seed VC fund backing bold ideas across Consumer AI, FinTech, and Enterprise AI.
This week on Eximius Echo, we’re looking at one of the most important Consumer AI opportunities in India: Health & Fitness.
The First Problem Is Getting Care
The Size of the Market
In a country of 1.47 billion people, healthcare is one of the most fundamental needs to address. AIIMS Delhi alone had 4.8 million OPD patients across 2024-25, pointing to the scale of demand in India’s soon-to-be $320 billion healthcare ecosystem. The core challenge remains access.
The Access Issue
India has only 1.3-1.5 hospital beds per 1,000 people, against a global median of 3. Rural users often travel hundreds of kilometres for basic care. At the same time, India has a growing chronic disease burden, with around 90 million adults living with diabetes and 220 million with hypertension. The problem is both access and long-term wellness.
Tech Penetration in India
Alongside infrastructure investment, technology can help bridge this gap. Healthcare in India has been slow to adopt technology at scale, but recent nationwide initiatives are changing the base layer:
These are important building blocks, but individual user adoption remains limited. Healthcare in India still feels reactive, short-term, and generalised. The next leap will come from intuitive, personalised, and reliable solutions that help Indians access care and manage their health better. This is where AI enters the conversation.
AI is Hastening Innovation
Globally, AI is changing how people interact with health, moving users from one-off symptom checks to deeper guidance on fitness, recovery, sleep, nutrition, and long-term wellbeing. Around 40M users approach ChatGPT daily for health-related questions, including broader queries around wellness and longevity.
While still very nascent in its adoption and evolution, AI is already engendering considerable progress across 3 key domains:
1) Personalised Coaching
AI’s biggest utility lies in its ability to retain long-standing contexts and provide precise answers catered to individual users. Levering this functionality, companies are now creating AI-powered personal healthcare coaches that analyse a user’s entire health history and lifestyle to provide personalised recommendations on improving their overall health. While this can be utilised for short-term ailments, the real application is managing long-standing complications.
2) Enhanced Imaging Diagnostics
Medical imaging is a highly precise process that entails a lot of moving parts. In addition to being expensive, the process frequently causes discomfort and anxiety amongst patients. AI can hasten scans by 75% while producing higher-quality results. Further, due to its ability to account for anomalies that might be imperceptible to the naked eye, AI is also very useful in analysing the results and sharing an initial diagnosis of all the aberrations.
3) Real-time Monitoring
While wearables like wrist-bands have boomed in popularity over the last decade, most of these solutions operate in siloes. AI can not only engender a cohesive ecosystem, tying all the different streams of data together, but it also allows for real-time interface with physicians. This can prospectively also lead to specific solutions for remote monitoring, particularly for elderly patients, to track their vitals and flag any alarms as proactively as possible.
Notably, all of this will accelerate with greater implementation of AI across other facets. While hovering around 15% globally, AI’s addressable market share in healthcare is expected to grow to 30% by 2030.
This shift has also produced companies like Thrive Health, Nori, and Function Health, which are building hyper-personalised AI health concierges around individual health data, guidance, and longevity.
The Bigger Opportunity Is Daily Health Guidance
In India, the AI x Health opportunity is unlikely to be limited to premium wearables, longevity subscriptions, or quantified-self tools built for affluent users. The larger opportunity lies in making health guidance more accessible, contextual, and continuous.
Today, the average healthcare journey is still fragmented. A user visits a doctor, gets a prescription, runs tests, receives lifestyle advice, and is then expected to manage the rest independently. This gap is especially visible across chronic conditions, fitness, nutrition, preventive health, and recovery.
AI can become the layer that connects health data, doctor advice, lifestyle habits, and everyday decisions. The strongest wedges are likely to emerge across three areas:
1) Chronic Disease Companions
AI-led programs can help users manage diabetes, hypertension, PCOS, thyroid, cardiovascular disease, asthma, COPD, and chronic pain through reminders, risk flags, report interpretation, adherence nudges, and doctor escalation.
2) Medical Assistants
Voice-first, multilingual AI assistants can help users in Tier 2+ India navigate symptoms, prescriptions, lab reports, medication, and next steps across low-friction channels like WhatsApp, calls, and lightweight apps.
3) Personalised Health Coaches
India needs online-first health guidance that understands regional diets, languages, family structures, affordability, and local health behaviours.
The real opportunity is to turn fragmented information into simple, reliable, everyday guidance that users can access repeatedly, not just when they are already unwell.
The Real Moat Is Trust
For AI to meaningfully change health in India, access alone will not be enough. Healthcare is deeply personal, high-stakes, and dependent on reliability. Users will adopt AI health tools when they feel accurate, safe, contextual, and easy to act on.
This makes trust the real moat.
The strongest AI x Health companies in India will need large amounts of local health data to train well across symptoms, prescriptions, diagnostics, chronic conditions, regional diets, languages, and patient behaviour. This data depth can help them move from generic advice to guidance that works for Indian users.
Usage can then become a compounding advantage. As users return across symptoms, reports, medication, chronic care, nutrition, fitness, and recovery, the product can retain more context, personalise better, and improve recommendations over time.
This also helps fix a broken LTV/CAC equation in consumer health. Historically, users engage episodically, and platforms pay repeatedly to reacquire them. AI can make health engagement more continuous, increasing retention while reducing servicing cost over time.
The UI/UX also needs to improve. Today, users are stuck between expensive doctor access and unreliable Google searches. AI can create a better front door: conversational, vernacular, personalised, clinically informed, and able to escalate to doctors when needed.
The opportunity is clear: India needs an AI-led health layer that helps people understand their bodies earlier, manage their health better, and stay well every day.
If you’re building at the intersection of AI, healthcare, fitness, chronic care, or personalised health guidance, write to us at pitches@eximiusvc.com. We’d love to hear what you’re building.