India
Health tech
A wellness app, a hospital workflow tool, and a medical device are three regulatory objects.
Startup EcosystemsIndiaHealth tech
Rules
The Central Drugs Standard Control Organization regulates drugs and, under the Medical Devices Rules of 2017, medical devices. A product that diagnoses, or that the law treats as a device, does not get to call itself software and skip that file. A scheduling or records product sold to a hospital may never be a device and still has to live with how hospitals buy and pay.
Clinical practice is a separate licence from device approval. Telemedicine has its own professional guidance. This page does not summarise it into permission. If the product touches a patient, the company’s lawyer reads the current text. GRIP will not guess the class of a device.
Who pays
Hyderabad’s life-sciences base is the closest Indian city cluster to laboratory and contract research. Chennai has a long private-hospital sector and the research park beside IIT Madras. Neither fact makes a national health-software market. Public hospitals, insurers, and private chains buy differently, and several of them pay slowly.
Export of a device or of a clinical service meets the importing country’s regulator as well as CDSCO. A domestic pilot in one hospital group is not that export.
Other sectors
SaaS
Software sold on a contract, often to a buyer outside India. The labour is local. The revenue currency often is not.
Fintech
Most of what is called fintech in India sits on public payment rails and on someone else’s balance sheet.
Artificial intelligence
A public mission exists. The labour market is still mostly application work and services, not a guarantee of a frontier model.
Deep tech
A longer recognition window is an administrative fact. A laboratory company is still a slow company.
Consumer technology
A national install base is not a national habit of paying. Language, price, and logistics decide which India is the customer.
Manufacturing
Factories are a state subject in practice. A production-linked incentive is a contract about incremental sales, not a startup category.
Climate tech
Electrons, materials, and carbon claims are not the same business. The grid is state-regulated.
Startup finance
The cheque has a licence, a border and a vehicle. The word ‘capital’ does not settle which of the three it is.
Talent
India’s advantage is a large technical workforce that works in English. Senior people who have shipped a product are a smaller group.
Domestic market scale
Scale inside India is real and uneven. A single national market size is a modelling choice, not a customer.
Across GRIP
Elsewhere in the research
The same place, read from another desk.
- Real EstateHow a building is readUse, tenure and the building itself.
- EconomyIndia economyIndia is filed first as a company-formation system. The economy a founder meets is not yet a GRIP property market.
- InfrastructureIndia infrastructurePublic digital infrastructure changed how a firm starts. It did not abolish roads, power, ports, or the distance between Indian cities.
- RelocationLiving in IndiaA visa, a job, and a title are separate permissions. The week that would be lived comes before the deed.
- Global InvestmentEmerging is a classificationOfficial groupings exist to organise data. They are revised, they overlap, and they do not carry a required return or a required risk.
- Global InvestmentDemography is slow, and it is localAge structure and urban settlement shape housing need over decades. They do not time a purchase, and a national trend is not a city.
- Global InvestmentInfrastructure investment is a question of who paysA road, a power line, or a station is not a theme until the user, the payer, and the contract are named. Announced projects are not operating assets.
Continue with GRIP
Cities and sectors are different maps.
A sector note says which rule and which customer. A city note says who can be hired. Neither is a ranking.