Healthcare startup Qure.ai has raised $16 million in an equity funding round led by Sequoia India, with participation from MassMutual Ventures Southeast Asia, it said Thursday. MassMutual Ventures is the investment arm of US-based MassMutual Life Insurance Company.
Founded in 2016 by Prashant Warier and Pooja Rao, Qure.ai provides interpretations of radiology scans within seconds, reducing time to treatment in the critical moments of care. It also claims to be the only solution in the industry to detect every critical brain abnormality on a head CT (Computed Tomography) including five types of intracranial hemorrhages, cranial fractures, infarcts, midline shift, and mass effect (for tumor detection).
Qure.ai was incubated in data analytics Fractal Analytics, which is currently valued at over $500 million. Sequoia was an investor in Fractal as well. The startup is present in over 20 countries with a database of over seven million scans.
“This funding round will allow us to further invest into research and development and to expand the reach of our solutions, accelerating our mission of delivering accessible and affordable healthcare,” Prashant Warier, Co-Founder & CEO of Qure.ai. said.
Qure.ai also marks Sequoia India’s second healthcare deal in the last few months. It led a $12 million round in Pristyn Care in December. Pristyn currently employs doctors and partners with smaller hospitals to perform relatively non-critical surgeries such as hernia, piles and gall stone.
“Medical imaging is one of the fields in healthcare where there is enough digitized data to turn the promise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into a reality. The sophistication of Qure.ai’s algorithms and predictive analytics tools, coupled with their expert team of data scientists and physicians positions them very well versus their global competitors”, said Anjana Sasidharan, Principal at Sequoia, in a statement.
The deal also comes at a time when Sequoia is raising its seventh India fund, and its largest so far, of $1.3 billion. The Times of India reported on January 24 that it is raising a $1.3 billion fund, to be split into $750-800 million for growth stage deals, and $450-500 million for early stage deals.
Sequoia also invests in Southeast Asian markets such as Singapore and Indonesia from the India fund. It last raised a $690 million fund in August 2018, which it extended by $200 million in July last year.
(Above content has been sourced from a news feed)