Aryan Chauhan: Solving health challenges with entrepreneurship

"Aryan embodies the right balance between creating an in-depth product and the ability to sell," praises Kunal Bahl, co-founder of Titan Capital

By Manu Balachandran Forbes India Staff

Published: Feb 29, 2024 11:38:49 AM IST

Updated: Feb 29, 2024 01:27:00 PM IST

Full Bio

Aryan Chauhan, Co-founder, Zivov Image: Selvaprakash Lakshmanan For Forbes India; Outfit: Samyakk; Styled By: Esha Kothari; Assistant Stylists: Kaveri Halder; Hair And Makeup: Krishnastudio

Aryan Chauhan | 22

Co-founder, Zivov

At 22, Aryan Chauhan has an impeccable, and rather envious track record.

By the time he was 14, he was running his first startup, Bizchirp, which helped startups and SMEs connect and collaborate seamlessly. Then, as he finished school, Chauhan was among a handful to have been selected for the illustrious Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology at the University of Pennsylvania, a programme, which boasts an acceptance rate of less than 5 percent.

Chauhan still has one more semester to go at the University, but is currently on leave as he builds up his second company, Zivov, a Gurugram-based healthtech startup, co-founded with his mother. Zivov is trying to solve the problem of diabetes with a tech-first approach that ranges from personalised remission plans to continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) devices and drawing insights from them.

Even before he forayed into Zivov, Chauhan worked closely with Kunal Bahl, founder of Snapdeal and Titan Capital, where he led investments into the areas of fintech, healthtech, and the D2C segment. It was a cold email that, he says, he sent to Bahl, himself an alumnus of the Jerome Fisher programme, that led to him working with Bahl at Titan.

“When Covid-19 hit in 2020, I came back to India, and despite all the uncertainty, I knew I wanted to stay within the startup ecosystem,” Chauhan says. “At that time, Titan Capital was very small, I was the youngest there, but it did help me understand the Indian startup ecosystem in-depth.”

By 2021, Chauhan turned his attention full-time to building Zivov. “I had seen first-hand the troubles with diabetes,” Chauhan says. “I had lost both my grandparents to diabetes. So, I knew the challenge and I wanted to solve for that.”

Zivov initially started as a chronic care business, where the company offered a team of nutritionists, fitness trainers, and psychologists working with patients to reverse diabetes. Reversing diabetes means bringing their HbA1c levels to 106.5 mg/dL within six months, with the company soon scaling up to over 70,000 users.

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By 2023, Chauhan took the process one notch up by scanning continuous glucose monitors, a device to automatically estimate blood glucose levels, which then transfer the data to the phone. In India, pharma giant Abbot has a near-monopoly on CGMs.

“We created proprietary tech to scan the Abbott sensor due to which we’re able to provide this solution at less than half the cost as compared to our competitors,” Chauhan says.

“Aryan embodies the right balance between creating an in-depth product and the ability to sell,” says Bahl. “Aryan has been super quick to pick things up and has an execution-focussed mindset towards anything he decides to pick up. The never-say-die spirit in Aryan makes him a quality founder to work with.”

Now, Chauhan and Zivov are gearing up for their next growth phase, which includes building their own CGMs in addition to going global.