COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the spotlight on a five-year old startup with emergency ambulance service⁠

• At Stanplus, they offer emergency response services for over 40 hospitals and major corporations across India and also provide for emergency patient transport.
• In an interview with Business Insider India, Prabhdeep Singh, the founder of medical transportation startup Stanplus, shares how the company is dealing with the COVID-19 crisis.
• Through its Red Ambulance platform, StanPlus leverages technology to offer premium quality medical response to patients.

On Friday, a patient from Hyderabad, whose oxygen levels were dropping rapidly, was successfully transported from the city to Visakhapatnam, a distance of over 600 kilometres (km), in the search of a hospital bed. And coordinating this, was Prabhdeep Singh, the founder of medical transportation startup Stanplus.

As the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, or the tsunami as people are calling it now, wreaks havoc, it’s startups like Stanplus have offered solutions while the traditional outfits have struggled. From NGOs to individuals and social media platforms like Twitter have filled in a fatal gap in the system.

“It’s a race every day,” Singh told Business Insider, as he deals with a barrage of calls during the pandemic. At Stanplus, they offer emergency response services for over 40 hospitals and major corporations across India and also provide for emergency patient transport.

Through their corporate tie-ups, the startup claims to handle medical emergency services for over a million people.

The five year old startup ⁠— with 130 ambulances of its own, and access to another 2,800 via partnerships across the country⁠ — has been thrown into the spotlight during the pandemic. “The demand is three times what it was during peak Covid months last year. As compared to March this year, the demand is ten times higher now,” he said.

Singh, backed by investors like early stage investment firm Pegasus FinInvest, Hyderabad Angels and others, plans to use this momentum to expand his business.

“In the next three years, we aim to own 3,000 ambulances, 100 ambulances in each city we are present in,” he shared. Its Red Ambulance service, which is present in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Visakhapatnam, Bhubaneswar, Raipur and Coimbatore, will also be launched in Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, and Indore soon.

Through its Red Ambulance platform, StanPlus leverages technology to offer premium quality medical response to patients. “In the current situation, only 5% of Indians get an ambulance when they need one. And the average time is 45 minutes for an ambulance to arrive, we are bringing that number down to 15 minutes,” he said.

However, Singh’s plans go beyond the emergency ambulance service.

“We are building an integrated emergency response in the country. We are building the kind of intelligence that if you are wearing a smartwatch and have met with an accident or fallen, an emergency response can reach you immediately,” he said.

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