Everything at an IVF center except the medicine.
Fertility clinics in India are built around doctors — but cycles fail commercially, not just clinically. Scheduling, follow-ups, pharmacy stock, marketing, compliance registers and patient communication mostly run on WhatsApp forwards and paper. Lumen takes all of it off the clinician's desk:
- Operations & administration — front-desk workflows, scheduling, procurement, ART Act compliance calendars, patient coordination.
- Marketing & growth — websites, local SEO, Google Business Profiles, content, ethical partner-doctor networks, press.
- Software, purpose-built for IVF — Lumen HMIS (cycle tracking, appointments, billing, records), Lumen CRM (enquiry-to-cycle pipeline, WhatsApp-first follow-up), Lumen Pharmacy (fertility-medication stock and dispensing).
The model was built from inside its anchor deployment — Aansh — not in a pitch deck. Clinical care stays entirely with the doctors; Lumen's line is drawn exactly where medicine begins. Network scale today: awaiting audited figures.
A Level 2 ART clinic, run properly, far from the metros.
Aansh is a government-registered Level 2 ART clinic and ART Bank (MH/AC/2024/15441/L2/Chandrapur/132 · MH/AB/2024/11445, verifiable on the national ART registry) founded by Dr. Shweta Agarwal — one of only two Level-2 registered clinics in Chandrapur. I run its on-site embryology lab: ICSI, embryo culture and grading, PGT handling, vitrification, and quality control. Eggs, sperm and embryos never leave the registered facility.
On the operations side: transparent written pricing ("Clarity First" — IVF ₹1.2–2.4L per cycle, published, no hidden costs), a hub-and-spoke network across Vidarbha (Chandrapur hub; OPDs in Yavatmal, Gadchiroli, Adilabad, Asifabad; a free monthly camp in Warora), and in 2025 the partnership I spearheaded with Garbha.ai — AI-assisted embryo assessment that supports, not replaces, my grading. (Their model reports 94% classification accuracy on their own validation data — that is a vendor's model metric, not a pregnancy rate, and you should be suspicious of anyone who blurs that line. I wrote about this.)
Annual cycles, growth since 2021, satisfaction scores: awaiting audited figures — they go here the day they're documented, not before.
The clinic site Google's AI now cites first.
I rebuilt the clinic's website from a legacy Wix export into a 120-plus-page Astro site: per-city pages across the catchment, Marathi-language FAQ, full schema.org graph (clinic, physicians, procedures), llms.txt for AI crawlers, and compliance-first copy where every claim traces to a document. Google's AI Overview for the clinic's own query now cites the site first and extracts its facts correctly — registration status, address, pricing, hours.
The interesting part wasn't the code; it was deleting things. The old site claimed awards that didn't exist and statistics nobody could source. The rebuild's rule — no claim without a document — is the same rule this site runs on.
Putting small-town doctors on the internet, free.
Fewer than 15% of doctors in small-city Vidarbha have any online presence — no website, no Google Business Profile, nothing a patient can find. The program builds it for them free: a five-page mobile site, GBP and directory listings, WhatsApp and call buttons, hosting, a professional email. In exchange: mutual cross-promotion within the network — never paid referrals.
AI generates most of the content and code from a structured intake; the human time per site is under two hours. The first partner site — a paediatrician in Warora, 27 pages — is live. Doctors onboarded to date: awaiting audited figure.
The systems years.
At DeHaat (agri-tech unicorn, Bengaluru): SAP-to-bank API integration that automated vendor payments end-to-end; a Go backend issuing coupons in bulk from large CSV pipelines; WhatsApp support chatbots in RASA. Before that: Talend ETL at Société Générale, API test automation at ZEISS — and the project that started everything, a hospital management system for an IVF clinic in Udaipur, built as a 20-year-old in 2020.
Those systems taught me the thing Lumen is built on: in operations-heavy businesses, reliability is the product. The demo never matters. The Tuesday morning when the payment run just works — that matters.