VELUMANI IS BACK, AS A TOOTH WHISPERER

The Thyrocare founder wants to sink his teeth into India's crowded dental market

- T. Surendar

On most Saturdays, between the whir of drills and the shuffle of patient files in a busy suburban Mumbai dental clinic, you might find a 66-year-old entrepreneur bent over a whiteboard, talking unit economics instead of molars.

A. Velumani, the man who built Thyrocare into one of India's most efficient diagnostic chains and exited at close to a billion-dollar valuation, is back in builder mode. Not in diagnostics, but in dentistry. And not as a passive investor, but as an operating mentor with a stopwatch in hand and a disruption thesis in his pocket.

For the startup world, Velumani has lately become something of a folk hero—the scientist-turned-entrepreneur scaled with frugality, exited at scale, and now dispenses tough love to founders chasing growth without profits. At founder events, product launches, and television studios, he draws crowds that treat him less like an investor and more like a business philosopher.

But with his latest venture—a national dental platform being built under the AVM Smiles banner—Velumani is putting his own ideas back on trial. AVM Smiles is more than a side project, with the mentor once again becoming the operator. It is a live experiment, a test of whether his core doctrine can still produce breakout scale in a more crowded era.

Velumani's new initiative is very unlike his original diagnostic business. When he started Thyrocare, there weren't many labs with scale and having a diagnostic chain wasn't even an idea in the Indian market. Dental chains, however, are a reasonably large business today, and to that extent, he is trying to get into a market that isn't nascent anymore.

"Healthcare businesses have come a long way since Thyrocare started. So, it will be tough to emulate the same success that Velumani had in selling his first business," G.S.K. Velu, founder and chairman of Neuberg Diagnostics, observed.