SigTuple raises $19 M Series B funding led by Accel Partners and IDG Venture
AI-healthcare startup SigTuple has raised $19 million in funding. The investors in this round of funding include - Accel Partners, IDG ventures, Endiya Partners, Pi Ventures, Flipkart Co-founder Binny Bansal, VH Capital, and Axilor Ventures.
SigTuple, the AI healthcare startup has raised Series B funding of $19 million led by Accel Partners and IDG Venture. Apart from equity, Sigtuple has also raised venture debt from Trifecta Capital in this round.
It is a platform that analyses medical images, scans and videos, which generates information and data to help diagnosis. With this round of funding, the team intends to power the assembly and distribution of itsproduct AI100, research and development of new solutions and further enhancements of the existing solutions, clinical trials, and expansion in other markets.
Including this round, the total funding raised by SigTuple is at $25.54 million.
“Year-after-year, our confidence to transform the healthcare delivery has increased. We are excited about the future as we gear up to take our solutions and services to a larger base,” Rohit Kumar Pandey, Co-founder SigTuple said.
Building new products
The idea of applying artificial intelligence (AI) to medical data and starting SigTuple was conceptualised in April 2015 by Rohit, Tathagato, Rai Dastidar, and Apurv Anand.
Currently, SigTuple is working on multiple fronts, like crunching through microscopic images of blood to quantifying normal and abnormal blood cells to tracking sperm cells in microscopy videos, to localising pathologies in retinal scan images.
For pathology solutions, SigTuple has come up with a state-of-art smart device AI100 that is powered by a GPU. This device enables to digitise different biological samples like blood, urine and semen on a single click and then AI-powered software modules on the cloud utilises the digitised slide to generate a report.
SigTuple has also announced the soft launch of AI100 for blood analysis in India and is currently available for commercial deployments. AI100 will soon be available for urine analysis and semen analysis solutions. SigTuple is also planning to beta launch the solution for retinal scan analysis in the next quarter.
“Our belief is that technology can solve many problems which plague our society. Right from the time we started, our focus has been on building deep tech through research. We will continue on our journey in creating products driven by bleeding edge technology that will enhance the lives of people around us,” Tathagato said.
Core product focus
The team’s core product is Manthan, a continuous learning platform that uses AI for healthcare. The platform is used to churn data to generate intelligence. Manthana allows SigTuple to ingest visual medical data from different devices and build a longitudinal memory.
Manish Singhal, Managing Partner pi Ventures believes pathology for decades has remained largely undisturbed by use of new technology. SigTuple with their Manthana platform, powered by latest computer vision, AI algorithms and robotics has the potential to disrupt the whole landscape of $150 billion Digital pathology market.
“Their products make basic pathology affordable and accessible to all with high degree of accuracy. We are excited to continue to be part of supporting the talented team in their journey,” says Manish.
Manthana has the capability to train, validate, and execute AI- and ML-powered models to classify various objects of interest, detect diseases, and compute the metrics for reporting.
The metrics provided by the platform are supported by visual evidence which eliminates the need for the medical expert to sit next to the patient, medical device, or biological sample.
Using AI
“More than anything else, a strong source of encouragement for us has been the eagerness with which healthcare professionals at every level are awaiting such solutions. The inefficiencies and lack of quality in the existing workflow bothers them as well,” Apurv said.
Speaking on the investment, Barath Shankar Subramaniam - Principal, Accel Partners says that when they invested in the seed round in Sigtuple back in 2015, the thesis was around looking at the large gaps that exist in diagnostics - accessibility, affordability and accuracy.
“Today, Sigtuple has come a long way in addressing all those challenges by effectively combining AI and innovation around hardware and software. With the launch of AI100, Sigtuple is ready to go commercial with its cutting edge offering with India as the first market. We at Accel are proud and excited to be part of this exciting journey,” he said.
Expected to touch $79 billion in 2012, the healthcare sector is now expected to reach $160 billion by 2017, and $280 billion by 2020. Today, it is considered one of the largest sectors in India, in terms of both revenue and employment.