India is home to 4,892 startups in the health-tech space, and they have raised a total of $504 million between 2014-2018. Due to the lack of expert healthcare professionals, the healthcare industry offers a huge opportunity for AI to enable faster and efficient healthcare delivery. 

The healthcare industry in India is said to be one of the fastest-growing sectors backed by India’s rising income, health awareness and access to insurance. The increased quality of lifestyle and the rise of stress-related diseases is also playing a crucial role. According to various researches done in global markets, the nutraceutical market in India was valued at ₹26,000 crore in 2017 and is expected to reach ₹80,000 crore by 2023.

With a vision to build alternative foods and health-based nutraceutical-tech brand that helped consumers live a healthy lifestyle by offering them home remedy based products which channelise inner healing by detoxing free radicals, Bangalore-based Bhookha Haathi is utilising artificial intelligence and machine learning to fulfil its dream of a tobacco-free India.

Food and health-based startup, Bhookha Haathi was founded by Abhimanyu Rishi and Kusum Bhandari who are constantly looking for innovative ways to help them make healthier food choices through their alternative food products. The company was founded on the vision to create products that help solve the widespread problem of tobacco chewing that continues to be a prevalent vice in modern India. 

Bhookha Haathi deploys proprietary AI software which provides subscription-based personalised health solutions at an affordable cost to consumers who wish to substitute or replace their existing dependencies on consuming expensive, processed, strong and chemical-based medications to 100% natural compositions based on dried fruits, nuts, herbs, spices, seeds, grains & honey. 

Bhandari and Rishi claim that these personalised health solutions will not only cure many long term and hereditary diseases but at the same time, it also resolves many nutritional deficiencies and with no side effects at all. 

Bhandari and Rishi said, “We have seen growth to 10x since inception with around ₹3 Crore as revenues. We made revenues of ₹30 lakh in FY 17-18, ₹1.34 Crore in FY 18-19 and 1 Crore till Q2 of FY 19-20. We are a profit-making company with gross profits ranging anywhere between 13% to 17% y.o.y. We target to close this financial year between ₹2.75 Cr to 3 Cr.”

Flagship Product

Bhookha Haathi Replace is the flagship product which mainly replaces nutrient-deficient ingredients to a healthier one. It includes a range of dry-fruit and nut-based health boosters which are provided as an alternative to unnatural protein, vitamin, etc., a range of speciality honey which acts as a replacement for the artificial sugars. 

Use of AI/ML

The AI software provides subscription-based personalised health solutions to the consumers who wish to replace their existing dependencies on consuming expensive, processed, strong and chemical-based medications. On the AI technology part, the company is still developing and analysing various processes. 

Currently, the company is using a mix of techniques from search, knowledge, and abstraction to Artificial Neural Network (ANN) intensively which helps in identifying patterns from the data and learn form itself along with some parts of Markov Decision Process (MDP) for transitional probabilities.

Also, while performing multiple tasks such as diagnosis processes, treatment protocol development, nutraceutical medicine development, personalised medicine, etc., the AI system majorly helps in grouping patients with similar profiles in order to pre-empt the nature of disease which can arise due to their current health conditions and other external factors to recommend personalised preventive alternative food products. 

Core Tech Stack

The core solution stacks include LAMP i.e. Linux, Apache, MySQL or MariaDB, Perl, PHP, or Python. The frontend and backend comprise multiple modules which have been developed internally, open-sourced and API driven. The frontend is mainly developed with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript while the backend includes a mix of programming languages such as Java and .NET as well as databases and other robust platforms like MySQL and Amazon AWS.

Hiring Phase

At Bhookha Haathi, the candidates are usually hired from networks and technology-driven hiring platforms like LinkedIn, Naukri, etc. as well as employee referral programs. Besides this, the company follows a 7 step quality check while hiring employees which are

• The candidate must be engaged with the company’s vision
• Constant eager to learn
• Skilled at multitasking
• Should have a long term potential
• Ambitious
• A good team player
• Customer-friendly

Roadmap

The future roadmap of Bhookha Haathi is focussed on automating AI technology to an API based AI technology where other partners can lease the proprietary solutions for a minimal cost to enhance their consumer health and experiences.