Oncare Raises ₹27 Cr Series A: India Oncology Startup Expands Cancer Clinics

In India, a cancer diagnosis is often followed by a second crisis: the bill. A single course of chemotherapy at a corporate hospital can cost ₹40,000 per session. Surgery can push a family past ₹10 lakh. For the 1.57 million Indians projected to receive a cancer diagnosis this year, the treatment that could save their life is, for many, financially impossible.

That is the market Oncare is targeting. Not the premium patient at Apollo or Fortis. The middle-income family in Delhi NCR, Lucknow, Patna, or Kolkata who needs oncology services — standardised, coordinated, transparent — at a price that does not require selling a home to afford.

On February 24, 2026, Oncare announced it had raised ₹27 Crore (~$3.2 Mn) in a Series A funding round led by Sky Impact Capital, with participation from Huddle Ventures, Lotus Herbal Group, SteerX, and Tremis Capital. The capital will fund its expansion from 4 Delhi-NCR centres to Bengaluru and into UP, Bihar, and West Bengal — some of India’s most medically underserved large states.

Company at a Glance

Oncare’s founding in 2023 put it into one of India’s hardest operating environments: multi-speciality oncology delivery inside non-Oncare-owned hospitals, in a market dominated by vertically integrated hospital chains with deep brand trust. The co-founders — Amar Sneh and Deepak Kumar — had previously worked inside India’s healthcare sector and designed the model specifically to avoid the two biggest barriers to oncology access: the capital cost of building hospitals, and the price premium of the corporate chains that do.

The Model: Why ‘Distributed’ Changes the Economics

The core insight behind Oncare is simple and powerful. India has thousands of mid-size hospitals — 50 to 100 beds — with clinical infrastructure, diagnostic equipment, and physical space that sits under-utilised because they lack oncology specialisation. Oncare does not build a hospital. It occupies one. It brings the oncologists, the treatment protocols, the care coordination software, and the Oncare brand into spaces that already exist.

The result is a cancer care centre that costs a fraction of what a greenfield build would require, opens faster, and can be replicated across any city where the partner hospital model works. With ₹27 Crore, Oncare can open multiple centres. With the same capital, a conventional oncology hospital company might open one.

The Price Advantage: What 40% Cheaper Actually Means

“We’ll use this fund to expand into Bangalore and open a few tertiary-city centres. The demand in underserved markets is clear.”

— Deepak Kumar, Co-founder, Oncare

The price comparison is not a marketing claim. It is a structural consequence of the model. When Oncare does not pay for hospital construction, land acquisition, or equipment procurement — costs that corporate hospital chains amortise across every patient — those savings flow directly into the pricing. ₹24,000 per chemotherapy session vs. ₹40,000 is not a subsidy. It is the arithmetic of a lower cost base.

For a patient requiring eight chemotherapy sessions — a common course for breast or colorectal cancer — the total difference is ₹1.2–1.28 lakh. In a country where 60–75% of cancer patients are treated privately and the median household income in UP or Bihar is under ₹3 lakh annually, that difference is not marginal. It is the difference between completing treatment and stopping it midway.

The Market: India’s Oncology Crisis in Numbers

India’s cancer burden is not a coming crisis. It is a present one. The country is expected to record 1.57 million new cancer cases in 2025 — up from 1.39 million in 2020. Experts warn the actual figure may be 1.5 to 3 times higher due to chronic underdiagnosis, particularly in rural areas and lower-income states. 75% of public-sector patients cannot access timely radiotherapy. In a country of 1.4 billion people, the specialist oncology infrastructure simply does not exist at the scale the disease burden demands.

The investor response is accelerating. Indian healthtech raised nearly $700 Mn in 2025. The oncology segment specifically saw landmark rounds: MOC Cancer Care ($18 Mn, Elevation Capital), Everhope Oncology ($10 Mn seed), 4baseCare (₹90 Cr). Oncare’s Series A adds to a wave of institutional confidence that cancer care delivery — not just diagnostics or pharma — is a fundable, scalable business in India.

Competitive Landscape: Where Oncare Sits

Oncare’s most important competitive distinction is what it is not competing on. It is not building a cancer hospital to rival HCG or AIIMS. It is not a genomics platform competing with 4baseCare. It is not a diagnostics company. It is a care delivery infrastructure company — filling the gap between diagnosis and the nearest affordable, integrated treatment pathway. That wedge is real, underfunded relative to the problem size, and structurally defensible through network scale and clinical protocol standardisation.

Expansion Roadmap

Key Risks to Watch

Who Should Be Watching

hat’s Next

The ₹27 Crore round gives Oncare 18–24 months of focused expansion capital. The Bengaluru entry is the immediate proof test: can the partner-hospital model work in a market that already has stronger oncology infrastructure than Delhi-NCR, and where patients are more likely to know their options? If Bengaluru works, the national thesis becomes much easier to fund.

The Tier-2/3 expansion into UP, Bihar, and West Bengal is the higher-impact, higher-risk bet. These states have the highest cancer burden relative to specialist access, the most financially constrained patient populations, and the least developed private hospital networks. They also represent the majority of India’s population. Getting the model to work here is not just Oncare’s growth story — it is India’s cancer care story.

Deepak Kumar and Amar Sneh built Oncare on a simple premise: that cancer care does not need to be expensive to be good. Three years and ₹35 crore in raised capital later, with 30,000 patients engaged and four operating centres, the premise is becoming a track record. Whether that track record can scale from Delhi-NCR to a national network is the question that a Series B will eventually answer.

Are you a hospital administrator, oncologist, or patient with experience of India’s cancer care system? Write to us at tips@startupfeed.in