Health tech startups deploy AI to overcome India’s preventive care apathy

Diagnostics provider Tata 1mg, fitness and health coaching platform Fittr, nutrition and lifestyle app Healthify and India’s largest hospital chain Apollo Hospitals have rolled out AI tools for everything from interpreting prescriptions and streamlining deliveries to offering customized plans. The ultimate objective: to keep users engaged.

The platforms are targeting growing awareness about health in India. The country’s fitness market is set to more than double from an estimated ₹16,200 crore ($1.9 billion) in 2024 to ₹37,700 crore ($4.5 billion) by 2030, growing at an annual rate of 15%, estimates a September 2025 report by Deloitte India and the Health & Fitness Association.

“We have close to 140 million people in India who are actively conscious about health and increasingly what is happening is that people are becoming more goal-oriented when it comes to health and fitness," said Praveen Govindu, partner at Deloitte India. “It's no more general fitness… people have specific goals; for example, they want to run a marathon, or participate in Hyrox."

Tata 1mg, backed by the Tata Group, has launched a tool to read and interpret a doctor’s prescription, providing insights and recommendations based on the readings. Last week, it announced a partnership with logistics intelligence provider ClickPost to utilise its AI-led software for automating last-mile delivery and supply chain functions.

“We’ve invested a few million dollars in enhancing our AI-powered tools. We’ll look at expanding this investment based on near-term results," said Gaurav Agarwal, co-founder of Tata 1mg. The firm is also working on improving its AI-enabled reader that analyses lab reports.

Fittr, a fitness and health coaching platform backed by Rainmatter Capital and Peak XV’s Surge, operates a digital coaching assistant that uses generative AI to personalize workout and diet plans. In the past year, the Pune-based company has spent a significant portion of its technology budget to roll out end-to-end medical-report analysis using LLMs, allowing coaches to incorporate blood markers and medical flags into recommendations, according to Jitendra Chouksey, founder and chief executive of Fittr.

“While exact numbers are confidential, the company’s internal AI roadmap has been funded through a multi-year product and engineering investment, with the last two phases – GenAI coaching and medical-report intelligence—representing the largest spend," Chouksey told Mint.

In December, Khosla Ventures-backed Healthify launched a refined version of its AI assistant that provides detailed analysis of nutrition and exercise schedules using voice and camera access. In August, Apollo Hospitals partnered with wellness platform OneBanc to use its AI engine to encourage lifestyle disease and stress management for its enterprise clients.

Even OpenAI introduced ChatGPT for Healthcare last week, noting that AI adoption in healthcare is gaining momentum, driven by its potential to help address these challenges. AI has helped physicians improve real-world clinical and administrative work as well as personalize care, OpenAI noted in its blogpost on 8 January.

Winning and retaining engaged customers, however, is not easy in India. Preventive medicine retention rates are low as the bulk of the consumers look at these apps as optional features.

The preventive health and fitness sector has the potential to drive behavioural shifts from 'sick care' to 'true care', said Ankur Dhandharia, healthcare partner at EY Parthenon India. “However, growth and scalability have lagged due to a fragmented ecosystem driving customer churn, limited integration with trusted health data, misaligned behavioural incentives, and generic health trends versus personalised insights."

Health firms are aware of the barriers.

Tracking fatigue, slow progress, unclear payoff, and overwhelming information are common friction points in digital health, often discouraging users from staying accountable, according to Fittr’s Chouksey. Moreover, many users are worried about the potential misuse of medical records.

Deloitte’s Govindu also flagged it as a key concern. “Whether you talk about gyms, or specific health supplements, etc, the challenge is stickiness. People will start, and then they’ll stop."

While firms declined to share user retention numbers, they say early signs of improvement are visible.

More than 30% of Tata 1mg’s customers engage with its AI features, especially report analysis, according to co-founder Agarwal. “There’s a lot of work in terms of monetization of these features that need to be worked out, but the initial traction is promising."

Fittr has seen as much as 20% of its user base convert to paid plans since the rollout of AI coaches. Habit formation has spiked, with a greater number of users now actively returning to the platform to track meals and routines, according to Chouksey.

“We’ve observed that users who receive personalized insights from medical reports, habit-risk alerts or AI-generated contextual recommendations show meaningfully higher adherence and faster transition into routine building compared to those who rely only on generic diet plans."