RAJU VENKATRAMAN

Raju Venkatraman has founded 3 ventures and is the best example of the so-called “serial entrepreneur” as he has always exited these ventures at exactly the right time. His motto has been to exit the venture when it starts to consider moneymaking as the objective rather than as a significant by-product. His ventures are Vetri Inc., Vetri Software Solutions, RevIT and now Medall. He considers himself unfit for retirement and has no plans of doing so in the near future.

Vetri Inc. was founded as a company for product development; but when he realized that the distribution of the products was a white elephant, he decided to move the jobs to India. Although Vetri Inc. continued in the processing of health insurance claims, he turned the company into Vetri Software Solutions, which was into database publishing, data access/retrieval systems, etc. The company made a global impact with purchases in areas such as Barbados, Granada, China, etc. Then Lason Inc. acquired Vetri and allowed Venkatraman to continue in his own right. But Lason declared bankruptcy and Venkatraman resigned from there in 2002. He then exploited the absence of effective healthcare processing providers to fill the space with his old ideas from Vetri Inc. He started RevIT, which processed the claims, as Vetri Inc. had. The major addition was that it also made the payments. This merged with ICICI bank’s Firstsource venture in 2005 and Venkatraman became the joint MD, a post that he held for 4 years. In 2009, he quit to venture into the diagnostics provision sector by acquiring Precision Diagnostics and rechristening it as Medall. The company has now been rated as the #1 emerging diagnostic services provider by Frost & Sullivan and Venkatraman attributes this to the people in the venture who have been carefully hand-picked and trained. The company fills a very important space and is the sole rock of organization amidst the chaos in the diagnostics sector prevalent in India.

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