Daybreak - Whitehat Jr taught Karan Bajaj a few lessons. Now he’s testing them on cancer

Episode Date: July 7, 2025

After swearing off startups post a $300 million exit, Karan Bajaj is back with Complement 1, a healthtech venture offering personalised coaching for cancer patients. But this isn’t just a pivot, it’s a whole new playbook.This time, it’s personal: Bajaj’s mother had cancer, and he says this is the product he wishes she had.Built for the American market, Complement 1 is taking a B2B route, targeting insurers, employers, and cancer centres. But early traction has been tough. Unlike edtech, healthcare demands more than just hustle. We look at whether Bajaj’s old playbook still works in a world where good intentions must meet rigorous standards and sustainable business models.Tune in. 

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. Back in 2020, Karan Bajajar, the controversial founder of White Hat Jr., vowed never to launch a startup again.

He had just sold his 18-month-old coding tutorial platform for $300 million to buy juice, which at the time was a pretty lucrative exit. Cut to present day and Bajajar's back. His latest venture is Compliment One. It's a lifestyle modification app that provides personalized one-on-one life coaching on exercise, diet and mental health for cancer patients.

It's a vastly different proposition from White Hat Jr. But that's not the only thing that's changed. complement 1, which is now a little over a year old, is based in Delaware and is built exclusively for the American market. When the Ken's deputy editor Arundhati Ramatan spoke with Thrupti Makar, Bajajajar, co-founder, Makar explained that the decision to launch in the US had everything to do with regulation. The US is one of the most tightly regulated healthcare markets in the world, and that means that the bar is always high. That's a standard complement 1 has really embraced.

From the get-go, it onboarded some of the top oncologists from the US onto its board. You see, for Bajaj, this one is personal. His mother had cancer. In fact, in a LinkedIn post, he wrote that Compliment One is the product he wished she had access to during her illness. But good intentions aren't enough to build a business. Compliment One hasn't yet cracked a viable business model. It's a B-to-B product targeted at insurers, employers and cancer centers. Makkar brings B2B experience, but Bajaj doesn't.

His playbook, which is build an MVP, blitz the market, stir up demand, work for White Hat Juniors direct-to-consumer model, but cancer care is not ed tech. They're vastly different worlds. That playbook may have made Bajajaj rich, but this time around, it will take much more than just hustle and hype. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Rahil Philippos, and I don't.

don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleagues Nikda Sharma and I will bring you one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Tuesday, the 8th of July. Here's the thing. Hyperbole and cancer care just don't go together. So there's absolutely no room for baseless claims or else you risk losing the oncology community from the get-go. That explains why the first thing Bajajajan Makkar did was bringing some of the biggest names in the business on their board. They brought in experts like Nigel Brockton of the American Institute for Cancer Research, as well as Dr. Neil Ayengar, who's an oncologist and researcher at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre.

Now, Broctin and Ayingar's first recommendation was an 18-month clinical trial with 158 people, and that's set to end in October. The goal was to show that personalised coaching can lower the cost of healthcare as well as improve the quality of life. And the reason for this elaborate exercise is simple. Complement 1 wants to be taken seriously. It does help that in the US, Bajaj won't have to feel questions about why White Hat went bust after Bajus bought it, or how a quick exit meant his record of building a sustainable business was yet to be tested.

On the contrary, his $300 million exit actually ended up attracting experts, and hopefully down the line will do the same with customers as well. Now, the promise complement 1 is making is beneficial for both employers and, and insurers. At the end of the day, cancer patients cost five times more than any other patient. So the pitch to them is simple. Insurers only have to pay for the product if the patient shows adherence for 30 days and an improved quality of life. Adherence for context means attending 90 minutes of exercise every single week. But the thing is, adherence is hard. Remember, this intervention is taking place during active cancer treatments, which means there will be lots of ups and downs and how people

feeling because of treatment side effects, which is why since then, the model has shifted to a pay-per-session approach. Now, the end cost hovers around $1,800 for six months per US user. Compliment 1 is claiming 90% adherence and 30% reduction in healthcare costs as a result. The catch here is that that data is based on interim analysis of the 84 patients who have participated in their trial to date. Now, this is straight. out of Bajajar's standard playbook. He did exactly this at White Hat, showcase results even if it is from a limited number of clients. Stay tuned. Hi, this is Rahil, the co-host of Daybreak. I'm quickly pausing this episode to share something very exciting with you. We are hiring. We are looking for someone in the early stages of their journalism career, maybe your fresh out of journalism school, or you've done a couple internships and projects and are eager to take on your first full-time role in audio.

I'm looking for a co-host to help launch a brand new podcast from the Ken. This is a full-time role and you'll get to work closely with me as well as the rest of the audio team right from story pitches to interviews to shaping how the final show sounds. If you're curious, ambitious and absolutely love audio storytelling, we would love to hear from you. All the details will be in the show notes of this episode. Vajajas has a formula and it typically begins with a solid story. So with White Hat, it was that he wanted his kids to be creators early because he had discovered the depth that creation brought to his life very late.

He found that conventional school systems would never be able to provide that. That's what inspired White Hat. And that's how he began all his pitches. With complement one, he drew from his own personal experience of watching his mother suffer from cancer. In 2023, he and Makkar came across research pointing to exercise's transformative role in cancer. Bajajat at the time was looking for opportunities in the healthcare space. So when he found this, he immediately jumped at the opportunity.

He quickly assembled his A-Team, which comprised 14 people, many of whom had previously worked at White Hat. And then Bajar was on stealth mode for a year. He didn't want anyone to know what he was building because he was convinced copycats would very quickly emerge. His approach with White Hat was significantly different. For starters, he went from idea to product in just two weeks. But that's not the only thing that's changed about his approach. He's clearly also learned from White Hat's biggest folly at the time, which were unfounded claims.

You see, back in the day, parents would get irked by the company's claims. For instance, it would say that students as young as 13 could land six-figure salaries and jobs at Silicon Valley. This, despite the fact that they're being trained by teachers with zero coding experience. People realised that these claims were oftentimes baseless. At complement one, meanwhile, Bajaj has to be on much firmer footing. Makka told us that every claim on their website has been vetted by their legal team. The company's app has pre-recorded workout videos with exercise physiologists,

while coaches based in India monitor and guide patients live. These coaches are also responsible for tweaking plans based on the energy levels of cancer patients. The app currently has around 40 of them, most of whom are Indian. But here's what's interesting. We checked out the profiles of six coaches and realized that none of them had prior experience training recovering patients. These were mainly 20-something fitness influencers. When we checked with Makkar, she clarified that they do in fact train coaches and have them certified in science of exercise from the University of Colorado Boulder before hiring them. Currently around thousand are in the training pipeline and a lot rides on these thousand shoulders.

Of course, there's patient adherence, but there's also the insurer's subsequent. payouts. You see, when it comes to insurers, Bajajar is a suave negotiator. That's largely because of his background, and I don't just mean white hat. I also mean his time as a marketeer and leader across firms like PNG, Kraft Foods, as well as mass media conglomerate discovery, not to mention his brief consultancy stint. The clincher, of course, is his entrepreneurship experience, where he managed to deliver a successful exit. In fact, that's typically what he starts most of his emails to potential clients with. People aware of how he works

says he's very hands-on, very involved. While his team is in the US, he insists on writing every follow-up and leading every sales conversation. And Makkah too is just like that. The thing is, in this line of work, you kind of have to be. You see, there's a lot of fatigue among employers

when it comes to health and benefit programs. And that largely has to do with the fact that there's not a lot of ROI on this. So they end up cutting such companies. That's why Bajaj initially chose to do 100% outcome-based pricing for Complement 1. Initial projections we saw showed that the company has a goal of building an order book of around $1 million by 2025 end. But when we asked Makar, she said that they have no such targets and that it would take at least another 12 months to generate any meaningful revenue. And that's typical in a normal healthcare cycle in the US.

Right now, Complement 1 is focusing more on conducting pilots and top cancer centres in the US. including the likes of MSK in New York. The big challenge for Bajaj now is proving that he can create a sustainable business. Cancer is complex. Next to maybe just education. Both are areas where promises of a more secure future get people spending beyond their means.

Both are also meaningful businesses to be in. But the line between cashing in on vulnerability and selling a useful product is very thin. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Kent 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 unlocks daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and podcast extras.

Head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted by Rahil Filippo's and edited by Rajiv Sien.