Arokiaswamy Velumani is the founder and managing director of one of a most famous chain of diagnostic and preventive care laboratories named Thyrocare Technologies Limited. A. Velumani is an ex-scientist at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), situated in Mumbai, Maharashtra. Today his company Thyrocare Technologies Limited is known to be the world’s largest thyroid testing enterprise, has its outlets in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and the Middle East. Velumani is also the founder and managing director of Nueclear Healthcare Ltd. (NHL) a radiology diagnostics company with its main branch at Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra.
Early Life and Education
Arokiaswamy Velumani was born to a landless farmer in 1959 in a village on the outskirts of Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, he has three younger siblings and his mother was a housewife. He studied at Sri Venkateswara High School, Appanaickenpatti Pudur and worked as a kid in agriculture fields after school hours and during holidays to support his family.
At age of 19, he obtained his B.Sc. Degree from Ramakrishna Mission Vidyalaya in 1978 and later earned a Master’s degree in 1985. While working with Bhabha Atomic Research Centre he earned his doctor’s degree in Thyroid Biochemistry in 1995.
The Inception of Thyrocare Technologies Limited
After working for 15 years in BARC department at Tata Memorial Hospital in Parel, Mumbai, Maharashtra, Velumani decided to set up his own thyroid testing laboratory named Thyrocare in 1996 with his wife Sunitha who was working with the State Bank of India until the couple decided to leave their jobs to start Thyrocare with an initial investment of Rs 2 lakh. The first laboratory of Thyrocare was set up in Byculla, Mumbai focussing on thyroid testing. Later they also started the franchise model for procuring samples to be sent for testing at their central laboratory in Mumbai.
The journey of Thyrocare Technologies Limited
Started in 1996, to provide affordable thyroid testing and quality reports, Thyrocare became the first in India to install Total Laboratory Automation from Siemens, a 27m automation track. Within a year of its birth, we had 25 franchisees all over India, and today Thyrocare boasts of a spanned network of more than 1000 franchises across the country, with the main head office in Mumbai. The company possesses international standards of quality and is accredited by reputed Indian and global accreditation bodies viz: the International Organization of Standardization (ISO 9001-2000), National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL) and College of American Pathologists (CAP). In April 2016, Thyrocare conducted its Initial Public Offer (IPO) release, achieving over-subscription of 72.86 times.
Thyrocare is known to be India’s first most advanced and world’s largest thyroid testing laboratory and is currently a leader among diagnostic chains all over the country, with a turnover of more than Rs. 250 crores, and a brand value of more than 350 Million dollars. Thyrocare operates from its 2,00,000 sq. ft With an end to end automation, in-built scanners, own dedicated sample managers and a data management system, all three stages of laboratory operations – pre-analytical, analytical, post-analytical, are completely automated ensuring minimum errors and minimal human intervention.
