Bengaluru-based medical wearable device startup Ten3t Healthcare Pvt. Ltd said it has raised an undisclosed amount in a pre-Series A round led by early-stage ITI Growth Opportunities Venture Fund of Investment Trust of India, which is a financial services group backed by Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd director Sudhir Valia.
The round also saw participation from existing investor Pi Ventures, which is an early-stage technology fund, and angel investors such as Bhupen Shah, co-founder of Sling Media; Raghu Tarra, founding member of Sling Media; and Krishna Prasad Chitrapura and Raghavendra Prasad, co-founders of QikWell, the firm said in a statement. Other angel investors were: Vijay Chandru, co-founder of Strand Life Sciences; Deepinder Singh Dhingra, chief product officer at Noodle.ai; Ikuto Higashi, serial angel investor in healthcare startups in the US, Japan, and India; and Rama Voruganti, a senior technologist.
With the funds, the firm will expand the usability of a product called Cicer to homes, ambulance monitoring, and pharmacovigilance studies. Cicer monitors real-time ECG (electrocardiography), respiration, pulse and temperature and streams the reports in real time to the doctor’s tablet and the nursing station. This empowers a number of smaller nursing homes without an ICU (intensive care unit) to offer ICU-equivalent services when patients are walking around or even in their homes. Cicer can be used to get a spot ECG, that is, an instant reading, or can be worn for hours (similar to a Holter monitor, which is a small, wearable device that keeps track of the heart rhythm).
Ten3t, incorporated in October 2014, was founded by a team of physicians and biomedical engineers -- Sudhir Borgonha, a physician who studied at St. John’s Medical College, Bengaluru, and the Sloan School of Management, MIT; Rahul Shingrani of Marquette University, who has research and development experience in the medical device space; and Prasad Bhat, who has worked in regulatory and quality systems in medical devices.
Shingrani said, “Technology allows us to monitor patients anywhere and everywhere, and advances in artificial intelligence (AI) enable us to pick up subtle patterns in the patient’s vitals data. For every prevented episode, we can minimise the lifelong consequences to a patient and their family.”
Ten3T builds wearable medical devices that collect and integrate medical-grade data in real time. Besides manufacturing the devices, it deploys, manages and analyses the data with predictive functioning.
Each wearable device includes multiple sensors to collect clinical-grade data such as continuously streaming signals from ECG (electrocardiography), pulse, SpO2 (which estimated the amount of oxygen in the blood), respiratory rate and temperature. All data is gathered within 30 seconds and analysed and reported in real time.
The startup claims that more than 10,000 patient hours of monitoring at hospitals and at home have already been completed using Cicer, covering more than 750 hospital beds.
In December 2016, it raised an undisclosed amount of funding in its angel round led by Pi Ventures.
Another player in the medical devices and health-tech segment, Niramai Health Analytix Pvt. Ltd, which is a breast cancer screening startup, raised $6 million in Series A round led by Tokyo-headquartered management consulting firm Dream Incubator, TechCircle reported in February.
In June 2018, medical-technology startup SigTuple Technologies Pvt. Ltd raised $19 million (around Rs 129 crore) in a Series B funding round led by existing investors Accel and IDG Ventures India.
The startup builds cloud-based solutions for medical diagnosis using AI techniques and has tied up with medical institutions to get data for analysis.
ITI
In November 2018, Investment Trust of India (ITI) marked the first close of its Rs 150 crore ($20 million) early-stage venture capital fund.
The ITI Growth Opportunities Venture Fund hit the first close at Rs 30 crore with the entire amount coming as sponsor commitment from ITI Group, said Mohit Gulati, managing general partner at the fund.
The fund aims to raise Rs 100 crore and has a greenshoe option to raise another Rs 50 crore. It is targeting both domestic and overseas Limited Partners (LPs) to raise the capital. The ITI Group has made a soft commitment for the entire Rs 100 crore in case it doesn’t get enough external investors, said Gulati.
The fund will look to invest across sectors including health-tech, fintech, retail, AI and machine learning. “With my experience earlier in logistics, I see huge potential in this sector,” said Gulati, who was an investor in logistics company Ecom Express.
The fund has formed an advisory team.