IPO-Bound Fractal Proposes To Build AI Medical Foundational Model

IPO-bound AI startup Fractal Analytics has submitted an INR 150 Cr (around $17.5 Mn) proposal to the IndiaAI Mission to build a multimodal medical foundational model.

Fractal’s founder and chief executive Srikanth Velamakanni confirmed that the company is seeking a support of INR 127 Cr for the compute part.

Responding to Inc42’s queries, Suraj Amonkar, chief AI research and platforms officer at Fractal confirmed that the startup has proposed to build this model in around 11 months.

“We have proposed a grounds-up built multi-modal model that should give state of the art performance of vision-language tasks as well as specialised medical tasks, including advanced tasks that involve reasoning and medical reasoning. The model will be 8Bn parameters, and should give a performance that is comparable to performance of much larger models,” Amonkar said.

“This model will help cater to more advanced medical reasoning tasks and expand the scope and accuracy of our medical models,” he further added.

Founded in 2000 by Srikanth Velamakanni, Pranay Agrawal and Ashwath Bhat, Fractal offers artificial intelligence and advanced analytics solutions to Fortune 500 companies. 

Fractal is among the growing list of Indian startups looking to get listed on the bourses as it seeks to capitalise on India’s booming economy, access to a larger pool of investors and better initial public offering aspects in the country.

Reports surfaced last year that Fractal was looking to raise $500 Mn via its IPO at a likely valuation of $3.5 Bn with an eye on a public listing by March 2025. However, the company’s IPO plans haven’t yet materialised.

The SaaS startup entered the unicorn club in 2022 after raising $360 Mn from TPG Capital. Since its inception, it has raised $685 Mn in funding to date.

This comes at the heart of its plans to build India’s first large reasoning model (LRM) with a total investment of INR 118 Cr.  

Back in March, Fractal’s chief AI Research and Platforms officer Suraj Amonkar told Inc42 that while the company will infuse INR 42 Cr in the project from its own coffers, it is seeking a capital subsidy of INR 76 Cr from the Centre under the IndiaAI Mission.

The startup also launched a medical assist multimodal model Vaidya in August last year, which was said to compete with state-of-the art multimodal models at answering complex questions in the medical domain.

Earlier, the Mumbai-based AI startup developed and rolled out Kalaido.ai, an AI-powered model in India that can generate images from languages.

On the financial side, Fractal Analytics reported a consolidated net loss of INR 54.7 Cr in the fiscal year 2023-24 (FY24) as against a profit of INR 194.4 Cr in the previous fiscal. 

Meanwhile, the SaaS startup’s revenue from operations surged 11% to INR 2,196.3 Cr in FY24 from INR 1,985.4 Cr in the previous fiscal year.