BorderPlus is building a caregiver pipeline into Japan, positioning itself to supply Indian healthcare talent as New Delhi and Tokyo target the movement of 50,000 skilled Indians to Japan over five years.
The 50,000 figure comes from the Action Plan for India-Japan Human Resource Exchange and Cooperation, agreed at the 2025 India-Japan Annual Summit. It sits within a wider goal of two-way movement of more than 500,000 people over five years, of which 50,000 are skilled personnel and potential talents moving from India to Japan across sectors including IT, semiconductors, advanced manufacturing and caregiving. Caregiving is one of Japan’s most acute needs, and it is the segment BorderPlus is targeting.
The Mumbai-based company, co-founded in 2024 by upGrad co-founder Mayank Kumar and former OYO Europe president Ayush Mathur, runs a training-first model for healthcare talent headed abroad. It has placed more than 500 nurses overseas to date and operates eight training centres, six across Pune, Kochi, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Delhi, plus one each in Brazil and the Philippines. Japan sits alongside Germany and the Gulf Cooperation Council among its active destination markets.
Japan’s need is acute. Government estimates cited across industry reporting point to a shortfall of around 570,000 nursing care workers by 2040, driven by an ageing population and a shrinking domestic workforce. Recruitment into the sector runs largely through the Specified Skilled Worker (SSW) visa route, which requires candidates to clear a Japanese language test and a caregiving skills assessment. As of the end of June 2025, roughly 54,000 foreign nationals were working in Japanese caregiving under that status, with Indonesians, Vietnamese and Myanmar nationals making up about 70% of the pool. Indians numbered around 300, up 73% from the previous year from a low base.
BorderPlus frames its role as fixing a broken pipeline rather than simply moving people. “What we noticed when we started BorderPlus was that while everything existed, it was all broken and fragmented,” said Mayank Kumar, co-founder and CEO of BorderPlus, describing how candidates often pass through 10 to 50 middlemen before reaching an overseas employer.
The economic case for candidates is central to the company’s pitch. “In India, you can’t monetise blue-collar and grey-collar enough because the starting salaries here are ₹15,000 to ₹20,000 per month. But the moment they get deployed internationally, their salaries go up to about ₹3 Lakh to ₹4 Lakh per month,” Kumar said in an earlier interview outlining the venture’s rationale. For the Japan track, BorderPlus lists monthly earnings of ₹1.2 lakh to ₹1.5 lakh and post-landing support running for five years.
The government framework is building the rails. Japan has been added as a destination on India’s e-Migrate portal, and a dedicated India-Japan channel on the National Career Service platform matches candidates with certified Japanese employers. BorderPlus, which raised 7 million dollars in funding led by Owl Ventures, has also built AI tools into its training, including a “Nurse Companion” that lets candidates rehearse clinical conversations before departure.
Whether the caregiver pipeline scales toward the corridor’s headline number will depend heavily on factors outside any single operator’s control, chiefly visa processing and regulatory approvals, which Kumar has flagged as the biggest constraints on deployment timelines. The 50,000 target covers all skilled sectors, not caregiving alone, and how much of it converts into care-sector placements remains to be seen.
