Healthcare startup Biosense secures $500K funding from GSF India and Insitor Fund; Will Launch uCheck in April

A startup in the low cost medical devices segment, Biosense is the brainchild of four socially driven founders from Mumbai. In an announcement today, Biosense has secured funding worth $500k from GSF India and Insitor Fund, a social venture capital fund that provides debt, equity and mezzanine funding to early-stage social enterprises in Developing Asia. Biosense was a part of the first batch of the Global Super Angels Forum (which went on to take a larger role in the subsequent year).

Myshkin Ingawale, Dr.Abhisek Sen, Dr. Ygesh Patil and Aman Midha are the people behind Biosense. Their first product was ToucHb which is now ready for production and commercialization (read more about it). More recently, Myshkin Ingawale debuted their latest product at the annual TED 2013 conference in California last month. “Cellphones, everybody has them,” he said, engaging the audience with his ambitious plan to democratize health care. “And everybody pees. There has to be something interesting going on here.” This is the latest app- uChek, (urine analysis via smartphone) which will be launched in April 2013.

uCheck will pioneer autonomous healthcare, allowing physicians and patients from around the world to analyze urine using their smartphones, measuring up to ten parameters such as glucose, ketones and leukocytes.

A 10 person team now, the funding will be used to consolidate their production plans and commercialize the inventions. Ex-Googler Samir Sood of GSF sits on the board of Biosense. “We were especially interested in Biosense for its regard for social impact as a pioneer in grassroots public healthcare,” said GSF founder Rajesh Sawhney. The accelerator invested $150K in Biosense during its first month of operation.

More about the products:

ToucHb: It is a hand-held needle-free battery operated device that enables screening for anaemia and simplifies monitoring of treatment on a regular basis. It democratizes healthcare by empowering health workers with appropriate technology and enables them with actionable data.

uCheck: The uChek app works with any urine-test dipstick, with the familiar set of colored boxes that change to indicate levels of things like ketones and pH in the pee. To use the app, one has to dip the stick in the pee and put it down next to a washable color mat, then take a picture of the two at certain time intervals. The point of the mat is to provide a reference color palette that can be compared to the stick in any light. Then the app locally analyzes what it sees, and displays the levels and the trends.

More about Biosense on their website.