When Amit Lohiya's father was having a kidney transplant and needed a blood transfusion, he found himself looking for replacement donors. That is, find people willing to donate blood to 'repay' the blood bank for the units his dad needed. This wasn't easy, especially when he was tense about his father's condition.

Mr. Lohiya's case isn't unusual. Despite Maharashtra's State Blood Transfusion Council (SBTC) mandating that the practice be stopped and telling blood banks that they should achieve their targets through voluntary donations, families find themselves in similar situations, desperately reaching out to friends, social networks, strangers, often at very short notice. What is unusual is that his personal experience inspired Mr. Lohiya to create a solution.

For eight years, Mr. Lohiya, who is an electronics engineer, had worked in high-tech projects in the Netherlands and UK, and as a consultant in Denmark. In 2016, he quit his job and set up BloodLink as a social enterprise in Copenhagen. In June 2016, the company won a place at the think-tank Thinkubator in Copenhagen. By the end of the year, BloodLink come to India to do its first costumer research. It had also applied to the Danish Innovation Fund, and secured funding in December 2016.