Daybreak - Orange is the new healthcare bet Amazon won't commit to

Episode Date: December 22, 2025

Buried deep in Amazon's app is a partnership with Orange Health Labs for at-home diagnostics—it's third healthcare experiment in India after pharmacy and telemedicine. The strategy? Target existing customers with zero advertising spend, keeping the bet low-risk while competitors like Bigbasket and Blinkit capture other categories. With its U.S. healthcare playbook built on insurance infrastructure that doesn't exist in India, Amazon is playing a cautious waiting game. The question: is this genuine ambition or just a way to keep a foot in the door?Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too. It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganeshan, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production.

Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording. Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get an alert as soon as we release our first episode, please follow intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. 25-year-old Devi is based in Bangalore. When the city got colder in November, she came down with a severe fever.

So she did the obvious thing. She googled at-home blood tests. The first sponsored result that popped up was from Orange Health. But she ignored it. And because she'd heard of Dr. Lal Path Labs before, that's what she clicked on instead. It's not just Devi. That's just how most urban Indians think. They stick to the lab brands they know of.

But what almost no one realizes is that Amazon wants to ship you your blood tests too. And it's already doing it through Orange. Their partnership began in June. when Amazon started funneling customers to Orange Health Labs for at-home diagnostics. But you might never even know it. The feature is buried deep in the pharmacy tab, hidden behind coupons and cross-cells. When you finally find it, Amazon kicks you off their page and onto Orange's website, which asks you to log in again.

For a company that patented one-click buying, this feels like checking a box on an internal to-do list that just says healthcare. This feature has even escaped most doctors. Take Vishnu-Bhasan, a Delhi-based pathologist with 15 years of experience. He had no clue about it either. Industry executives also agree that Orange is far from a household name. But it's built a kind of tightly controlled fast turnaround network that Amazon clearly values. Over the past few years, it has expanded across major metros and built its own labs,

including a national reference lab in Bangalore. It does the unglamorous things Amazon usually avoids in India. That is, controlling supply chains, hiring phlebotomists, basically the healthcare pros train to draw blood, running bans on time and delivering results in six hours. When asked how the partnership is going, both companies weren't ready to share numbers. Tarun Bhambra, the co-founder at Orange, said it was a pilot that was generating early excitement. But a person close to Amazon said that the tie-up has actually exceeded internal expectations. See, Amazon doesn't need to spend splashy dollars on customer acquisition.

They're currently relying on their own huge data set. Because if even 3 to 5% of Amazon buyers start booking tests, Amazon immediately becomes one of the largest players in India's $15 billion diagnostics market by default. And this hints at the larger truth. Amazon doesn't really want ownership of this diagnostics vertical, just the possibility of it. Why? Because, well, diagnostics does look good on paper. It has high margins, recurring demand, and urban growth on its side. But it requires everything Amazon doesn't quite enjoy doing in India, which is reverse logistics, sample handling, trained technicians and time-sensitive operations.

Here's how Raju Barak, a pathology veteran put it. at-home collection isn't new. The real problem is execution. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Rachel Virgis, and every day of the week, my co-host, Niktha Sharman and I will bring you one new story that is worth understanding

and worth your time. Today is Tuesday, the 23rd of December. For Amazon, the most telling part is in the invisible rollout. It's that diagnostics is the first healthcare segment entered through another player. In fact, Amazon put 12 million dollars into Orange just last December, which brought Orange's total funding to $47 million.

Now, Amazon Clinic and Amazon Pharmacy were built internally. Diagnostics arrived through Orange, a company that runs precisely the on-ground operations Amazon has never even attempted in India. A person familiar with Amazon's strategy said that the company evaluated other routes but concluded that building diagnostics from scratch would take years and distract from core priorities. Partnering was faster and safer. The choice made sense. Diagnostics looks lucrative. It has high gross margins, low reagent costs, predictable demand. Kostav Das is a former Flipkart Health Plus growth head. He told my colleague, the Kenrapporteur Sidesha Rui, that lab

tests are actually an 80% margin business, while e-pharmacy is barely 20%. But the economics change quickly when it comes to scale. The pathologist we mentioned earlier, Vishnu Bhassan, said that this is not a typical logistics problem. Diagnostics demands, high-touch service, trained phlebotomists and consistent turnaround. Flipkart learned this after acquiring Sastastas Sundar, rebranding it as Flipkart Health Plus,

while partnering with Metropolis and briefly even Orange. An e-commerce expert said that the health vertical barely even registered compared to Flipkart's core categories like fashion or electronics. With this context, Orange was a logical choice. It was fast, integrated and flexible. On the other hand, Legacy Labs are doing well enough on their own that they actually have no incentive to partner. In fact, a pathologist said that they might actually end up diluting their own brand.

So they just stay away from partnerships. A person close to Amazon said the company deliberately avoided established chains like Dr. Lal or Apollo. The person also said that it was because Amazon found them too aggressive and the way they reached customer was too different from how Amazon does it. Even Amazon's 2024 investment is more about testing diagnostics, not committing to it. Tarun Bhamra, Orange's co-founder said the funds will go into deep integration with Amazon's workflow and to expand capacity across cities.

You see, Amazon's oldest healthcare bet, Amazon Pharmacy remains tiny even in its fifth year. Kostavdas told Sudezha that it has only around 600 to 800 crore rupees in revenue, which is roughly one-tenth of Pharmacy's revenue and a quarter of Tata 1MG. The problem isn't even the product quality. It's just that in consumers' minds, Amazon hasn't really made itself a mental reference point for when it comes to healthcare. Multiple industry executives see the same pattern.

Amazon's healthcare ventures are checklist bets, held lightly but kept alive because the category is too big to ignore. The thing is, Amazon's core e-commerce business has been stuck in a growth rut for a while. So even lukewarm healthcare experiments are starting to look worthwhile. The bet is low risk. Amazon targets existing users rather than spending on new customer acquisition. So this seems like a solid way to remain the everything store. More on this in the next segment. Amazon's healthcare ambitions didn't begin in India.

They began with a bold, ultimately doomed experiment in the US. In 2018, Amazon joined Berkshire Hathaway and GP Morgan Chase to launch Haven. It was a non-profit venture meant to reduce healthcare costs for more than 1 million employees. Three giants, one mission. It lasted less than three years. The problem was, each partner kept running its own health business. plan, which ultimately undermined Haven's negotiating power with insurers. Without this unified scale, the economics ultimately failed.

That theme, insufficient scale, insufficient volume, has haunted Amazon's healthcare bets. So, in 2023, Amazon tried a different approach. So in 2023, Amazon tried a different approach. It bought one medical, a membership-based primary care provider for nearly $4 billion. Soon, One Medical became the blueprint for Amazon's healthcare ecosystem everywhere, including India. But the problem was, One Medical's model rests on a structural advantage that doesn't exist here. In the US, One Medical plugs into insurance infrastructure, billing plans for visits, tests and prescriptions. Membership fees and insurance reimbursements make it financially viable.

But none of that works in India. where outpatient care is paid out of pocket and insurance rarely covers everyday healthcare. So Amazon is here but playing it differently. It has the same three ingredients, pharmacy, clinic, diagnostics, but without the economic engine that powers its American counterpart. Which is why India's version looks lighter, quieter and far more cautious. The person close to Amazon said the company expects the new service to follow a predictable adoption curve.

An initial spike followed by a year of zigzag demand and meaningful stability only after about 14 months. Real scale will only be judged over a three to five year horizon. These are the timeframes Amazon uses for other slow burn verticals in India. Still, for all its caution, Amazon isn't stepping away from healthcare in India. Its activity over the last year, Amazon Clinic, the Orange Partnership, suggests a company that wants the seat at the table. The Samba Venture Fund, through which Amazon invested in Orange,

was recently topped up to $3.50 million, with health and nutrition as explicit priorities. But capital is not commitment, and Amazon's behavior still signals ambivalence. There really isn't much to lose either. Like we mentioned earlier, Amazon is tapping into its own customer base instead of spending on customer acquisition. This makes healthcare an unusually low-risk experiment for Amazon.

It's an option, not a compulsion. A person close to the company said that another reason for Amazon's muted rollout is a desire not to offend offline healthcare channels. The person said that if Amazon goes very aggressive, it creates problems with how offline partners are structured. A healthcare industry expert called it an outside bet, one that Amazon wants to keep warm because sector, structural tailwinds are impossible to ignore. See, India is aging. Chronic conditions are rising. Recurring high-frequency customers, the kind Amazon loves, will only grow. So Amazon has its

reasons for not wanting to miss the next big habit shift. The company has already watched Big Basket take grocery and Blinket take quick commerce. An e-commerce professional said that patients with chronic illnesses are the true customers for this category. So, if Amazon can lock in retention the way it has in other markets, healthcare becomes a meaningful business. Just maybe not today. Because at the moment, Amazon's resources are pointed elsewhere. Towards fashion, electronics,

and especially the 10-minute delivery battle that it views as a matter of survival. Yet, the opportunity is real. Amazon has the tech, the data, the scale. It just hasn't decided whether health. is a business it wants to build or just a door it wants to keep its foot in. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription offers daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium

podcasts. To subscribe, head to the Ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Rachel Vargis and edited by Rajiv Sien.