The Portea IPO looks like a rescue act

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Editor's note: Two weeks ago, home healthcare company Portea filed its draft initial public offering papers. The company, founded and run by serial entrepreneur couple K. Ganesh and Meena Ganesh in 2013, is the second health technology startup to attempt a public listing in the past year; the other one is online pharmacy PharmEasy, which filed a draft red herring prospectus late last year but hasn’t gone ahead with an IPO yet. From the series of startups backed by the Ganesh couple—including BigBasket, BlueStone and HomeLane—Portea is in fact the first to have filed for an IPO. And it is a fascinating one, to say the least.  Portea, incorporated as Healthvista Ltd, is an out-of-hospital healthcare company. Its primary proposition is home care: primary, geriatric, palliative, post-operative, intensive and even mother and baby care. That’s about 60% of its revenue from operations. A good 20% comes from procuring pharmaceuticals from companies and selling them to its patients at a margin. The rest is from the sale and rental of medical equipment.  In its draft red herring prospectus, Portea says it is the …