Healthcare logistics · Emergency medical transport
HelpNow
An app that aggregates private ambulances and converts rideshare cabs into medical first responder vehicles in India. Built by three IIT Bombay students, backed by Y Combinator in 2020, and now marked inactive on the platform that funded it, with a website that no longer loads.
A father, a phone, and no ambulance
Aditya Makkar was a teenager when his father had a cardiac arrest. What happened next is told two ways in two sources. The Better India, an independent outlet, reported in 2021 that Makkar called around, found no ambulance, and got his father to hospital in a cab instead. Makkar himself, in a 2020 interview with Insight, the student media body of IIT Bombay, said something closer to the opposite: “My father had a cardiac arrest just a week before my JEE exam, thankfully because of the contacts we had in the hospital we were able to get an ambulance on time.” Both accounts agree on the shock of the moment. They do not agree on whether an ambulance came.
That response became HelpNow: an app meant to do automatically, for anyone, what Makkar’s family could only manage through a personal hospital contact.
The gap it is aimed at
India has a fraction of the ambulances the World Health Organization recommends for its population, according to the founders’ own account of their pitch. Response times in large cities routinely run past 30 minutes, and there is no single number to call that reliably dispatches a nearby vehicle. HelpNow’s answer, pitched as “Uber for ambulances,” was to build a software layer over the private ambulances that already exist in a city, track them, and route the closest one to a caller. Where ambulance supply fell short, the company converted rideshare cars into “MedCabs,” fitted with a mini ambulance kit and drivers given basic medical training, to serve as first responders ahead of a full ambulance.
Three students, one E-Cell competition
Aditya Makkar and Shikhar Agrawal started the idea in their second semester at IIT Bombay, first as an entry for the campus entrepreneurship cell’s EUREKA competition. Venkatesh Amrutwar, a 2017 IIT Bombay graduate and former overall coordinator of the college’s E-Cell, joined as a third co-founder in 2019, leaving a job to do it full time. By their own account, the team reached the EUREKA semifinals, was offered $150,000 in seed funding at the end of their freshman year, and turned it down because they were not ready to leave college. They kept building and reapplied for outside capital the following year.
The company was legally registered as Pentanami Technologies Private Limited on January 24, 2019, per India’s Ministry of Corporate Affairs records, and HelpNow itself says it launched on Maharashtra Day, May 1, 2019. The MCA filing lists the registered address in North Delhi, not Mumbai, where the company says it operates and where its LinkedIn page lists its headquarters.
Y Combinator, and an unlikely pitch meeting
HelpNow was accepted into Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch, becoming, according to the founders, the only student-run team in their interview cohort and the only one from IIT Bombay selected that cycle. The founders say the accelerator brought in investors including the owner of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings and angels who had backed Uber, SpaceX and Snapchat, though the interview names no check sizes. Before any of that, in the company’s telling, actor Sushant Singh Rajput invited the founders, then 19-year-old sophomores, to his home to hear the pitch and agreed to promote the service; a planned crowdfunding project with him did not go forward.
The clearest funded numbers on record are small and come from data aggregators rather than the company. PitchBook logs an Angel round in January 2019, a Y Combinator accelerator investment of $13,700 in March 2020, an Early Stage VC round in July 2020, and a Later Stage VC round in February 2024, naming Enrission India Capital, Calm Ventures, Emles Venture Partners, Liquid 2 Ventures and Soma Capital among nine investors, with total raised at $139,000. Tracxn separately puts total funding at $125,000 in a single 2020 round from Y Combinator. Neither figure is confirmed by a primary filing: HelpNow has no US entity and no SEC Form D on record, so there is no regulatory filing to check either aggregator against.
Covid, and a crowdfunding push
HelpNow’s highest-profile stretch came during the pandemic. The company ran a 24x7 logistics network for moving Covid patients, drugs, phlebotomists and medical supplies across Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Pune, and partnered with the Mumbai Police and government hospitals. It also ran a public crowdfunding campaign on Ketto, separate from any equity round, drawing over 2.4 crore rupees from 4,700-plus contributors toward a 2.5 crore goal, per a 2022 Ketto blog post. That money funded free ambulance rides for slum residents and the poor, not equity in the company.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Legal registration | Pentanami Technologies Private Limited, CIN U72200DL2019PTC344905, incorporated Jan 24, 2019, Registrar of Companies, Delhi. Directors on file: Aditya Makkar, Amrutwar Venkatesh Anil, Shikhar Agrawal. Registered address in North Delhi, not Mumbai. | Public record |
| Y Combinator status | Winter 2020 batch. The company’s own YC profile lists its status as “Inactive,” and all three founders are flagged as not currently active YC users. | Public record |
| Corporate filing status | Two MCA data aggregators, Insider Biz and Tofler, list the company’s status as “Active” as of updates dated 2026, with no strike-off on record. That is at odds with the “Inactive” status YC shows. | Differs from YC record |
| Live website | gethelpnow.in and www.gethelpnow.in both returned a 404, “The requested path could not be found,” when checked directly on Sep 25, 2026. | Public record |
| Total funding raised | PitchBook: $139,000 across four rounds (2019 to 2024). Tracxn: $125,000 in one 2020 round. Both are aggregator estimates; no SEC Form D exists to check either against, since HelpNow has no US entity. | Two aggregators disagree |
| Employee count | YC’s own profile lists a team size of 50. Tracxn lists 6 employees as of August 2025, down 60 percent from a year earlier. LinkedIn lists a size band of 11 to 50. | Sources disagree |
| Covid-era crowdfunding | Ketto campaign reported over 2.4 crore rupees raised from 4,700-plus contributors, for free ambulance service to slum residents and the poor. This is donation-funded, not equity. | Independent |
| FDA, trial, NIH, NSF and PubMed records | None found. HelpNow is a logistics and dispatch service, not a device or drug maker, and none of these registries would be expected to carry it. | Not applicable |
Read plainly: the paper trail is thin and often contradictory. A real company was incorporated, ran ambulances in four Indian cities during the pandemic, and went through Y Combinator. But the two platforms most likely to know its current state, Y Combinator and the company’s own website, both say it is not operating, while the corporate registry aggregators have not caught up with a formal closure. No dollar figure here comes from a document HelpNow itself filed with a securities regulator.
What to watch
- Whether Pentanami Technologies Private Limited files for strike-off with the Registrar of Companies, resolving the gap between YC’s “Inactive” tag and the “Active” status MCA aggregators show.
- Whether gethelpnow.in comes back online or the domain lapses entirely.
- What the founders do next. Aditya Makkar’s LinkedIn headline describes him as a “2x Founder,” suggesting a second venture, though this profile found no independent confirmation of its name.
- Any named amount behind the February 2024 “Later Stage VC” round PitchBook lists, which has no public announcement attached to it.
In their words
“My father had a cardiac arrest just a week before my JEE exam, thankfully because of the contacts we had in the hospital we were able to get an ambulance on time.”
Aditya Makkar, co-founder, 2020 interview with Insight, IIT Bombay · Interview
“We are building an organisation HelpNow which is building India’s most reliable ambulance service and are reducing arrival time from 50 minutes to 10 minutes.”
HelpNow founders, 2020 interview with Insight, IIT Bombay · Interview
“We started with 10 lakh INR funding which is now converted into INR 7 crore in one year.”
HelpNow founders, 2020 interview with Insight, IIT Bombay · Company-stated
“We also had this interesting experience where Sushant Singh Rajput called us home to pitch HelpNow, and we (19-year-old sophies) actually went to his house! He agreed to promote it for us and also wanted to start a crowdfunding project with us but due to some unforeseen issues, it didn’t work out.”
HelpNow founders, 2020 interview with Insight, IIT Bombay · Company-stated
“These ambulances can now be accessed via the HelpNow app. When called, the app dispatches the nearest ambulance in the area within 20 minutes. The initiative has already helped hundreds of people offering free services worth Rs 50 lakh.”
Aditya Makkar, quoted in The Better India, Oct 20, 2021 · Independent
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordY Combinator company profile for HelpNow, status Inactive, batch Winter 2020
- Public recordPentanami Technologies Private Limited, CIN U72200DL2019PTC344905, corporate filing summary
- Public recordPentanami Technologies Private Limited, corporate filing summary
- Public recordPentanami Technologies Private Limited, company registration record
- Public recordDirect check of gethelpnow.in and www.gethelpnow.in, both returning HTTP 404
- Public recordSEC EDGAR full text search for “HelpNow,” Form D, zero results
- IndependentUnable to Find Ambulance For Dad, IIT Grad Built India’s Most Reliable Ambulance Network
- InterviewHelpNow founder interview
- IndependentHelpNow company profile and funding rounds
- IndependentHelpNow company profile, legal entity and funding data
- IndependentHelpNow company profile
- IndependentWhat Does HelpNow Do? India’s Emergency Ambulance Network Explained
- IndependentHelpNow, a 24x7 Ambulance Network For India’s COVID-19 Patients
- CompanyHelpNow company page
- CompanyHelpNow company profile
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
