Athulya Assisted Living is positioning itself as more than an assisted-living operator, building a senior-care platform spanning assisted living, home care and geriatric hospitals. Founder and MD, Dr R Karthik Narayan, spoke about the company’s evolution, changing customer profile, capital requirements, the senior-care ecosystem and plans to go public. Edited excerpts:What are your focus areas?Our assisted-living business has about 1,500 beds across five cities, of which around 1,000 are operational; the rest are under development. We provide home care through doctors, nurses, and caregivers who visit seniors at home. The third piece is geriatric healthcare, with our first hospital launched recently. The idea is to create a continuum of care rather than treating assisted living, home care and hospitalisation as separate businesses. We manage around 1,500 seniors across our assisted-living and home-care operations. Our facilities generally operate at 95-98% occupancy.Why was it necessary to enter geriatric hospitals?Senior healthcare needs a different approach from conventional acute care. Our customers may need oxygen therapy, pain management, rehabilitation, stroke care or treatment for chronic conditions, but not necessarily tertiary or aggressive intervention. The hospital brings these needs into our continuum of care, backed by an understanding of the patient’s history, functional ability and goals of care. We are not trying to become another large multispecialty hospital. Our focus is geriatric and secondary care.What is the opportunity you in the senior-care market?The bigger change is in the 80-plus population. As people move into their 80s, dependency increases substantially. They need help with medication, mobility, bathing, dressing, nutrition, regular medical appointments and fall prevention. India has a huge gap in specialised infrastructure. There are estimated to be only around 20,000 assisted-living beds in the country, compared with much larger capacities in China, UK and US. We are not looking at senior care as real estate. It is healthcare.What is the business model, how do you develop facilities?It is an asset-light model. We generally take entire residential blocks on long-term leases, typically nine to 15 years, and convert them into senior-friendly facilities. Earlier, we would take a residential block, invest heavily in interiors and then operate it. Now, we are moving towards greater capital efficiency. Developers are willing to build facilities specifically for us. This is an important structural change. Senior care is being seen as a value addition to residential communities.Your expansion plans?We have six facilities in Chennai and are adding three more, along with other facilities across India. We expect to add 400 beds in Chennai in the next phase. We target around 2,000 beds in the near term. By FY32, our ambition is to reach 5,000 beds. Around 80% of that capacity is likely to be in south India, particularly TN, Kerala, Telangana and AP. We are evaluating markets such as Pune and Ahmedabad.How do you fund this?We raised our first institutional capital in 2023 from Morgan Stanley’s social-impact fund, raising about `100 crore. That capital supported our expansion over the following three to four years. We are now looking at another fundraise in Aug-Sept. We are targeting about $30 million in primary capital. The company is fully profitable, so internal accruals will also contribute to expansion. As we are adopting an asset-light, lease-based model, we don’t require large amounts of capital to buy buildings. Capital is primarily required for service delivery, tech, training and internal upgrades.Will you tap capital markets?We want to be a listed company and our target is FY32. We want to build Athulya into the equivalent of an Apollo in senior care — a scaled, integrated healthcare platform with assisted living, home care and hospitals. The ambition is not just to create a chain of facilities. It is to create an entire senior-care ecosystem.What are the targets behind the expansion?We expect revenue to reach around `130 crore in FY27, with profitability also improving significantly. Our longer-term target is to reach `1,000 crore in revenue and `200 crore in profit by FY32. The objective is to build a large, profitable senior-care company rather than remain a niche start-up.
