Unitus Seed Fund Announces OmiX Labs As The Winner Of StartHealth Competition

Seattle and Bangalore-based, Unitus Seed Fund  has announced the results of its India StartHealth Competition. Bangalore-based Research & Diagnostics Labs, OmiX Labs stands winner followed by xBITS, a company that develops cutting edge and affordable diagnostic technologies.

With this, Omix Labs will receive a prize of about $15700 (INR 10 lakhs) and pitch in Unitus’ StartHealth investment Program, that includes up to $78600 (INR 50 lakhs) of additional non-dilutive funding, an investment of up to $ 157K (INR 1 Cr) from Unitus Seed Fund and go-to-market support from StartHealth partners Narayana Health, Manipal Hospitals, PATH, Pfizer and Unitus Seed Fund.

A Vijarajan, Founder and CTO at InnAccel and a StartHealth jury member said that OmiX Labs has a great team and collaborators needed for the success of the project. “Early stage disease detection in India is still at a very nascent stage and this product has the potential to be a new standard of care for infectious disease detection,” he added.

Another jury member, K Chandrasekhar, Founder & CEO at Forus Health said that he was very impressed to see a near commercial solution coming out xBITS. This startup will soon be pitching for entry to Unitus’ StartHealth investment Program.

Let us have a look at the top 10 finalists that were selected for StartHealth Competition:

OmiX Labs: Incorporated in 2014, OmiX Labs is a Research And Diagnostics Lab that has invented a hand-held portable device for vector-borne infection diagnosis and prognosis to reduce the time and cost to detect infectious disease pathogens. This device could be deployed to the more than 1 lakh diagnostics labs across India including  many small labs that currently don’t offer these type of lab services.

xBITS: It develops table-top diagnostic device for faster and accurate detection of urinary tract infections (UTIs). xBITS’s team is working on solving the drug resistance problem by separating out and detecting specific pathogen species.

Nayam Innovations: The company develops a novel implant using proprietary technology to radically improve the visual outcomes of cataract surgery.

Aindra Systems: The company is developing an innovative device that can be deployed at low-cost to assist with screening and detection of cervical cancer among women.

Chikitsak: The company is building a Bluetooth-enabled device that screens the vitals of subjects in remote area

Cooey Tech: The company is an end to end health monitoring IOT platform that intends to collect (device), store, analyze and provide insights of vital signs for patients.

Excocan Healthcare: The company creates oncotechnology platform to deliver cancer diagnosis and imaging

Matrikas Inc: Sensor-based kit for diagnosis of cervical cancer, HIV/AIDS and infections affecting women’s reproductive tract

Pravarthan Technologies: The company develops technology solutions to provide high-quality healthcare for the masses including micro-wireless ECG devices and cloud platform for remote specialist consultancy services.

Lifesense Medical Systems:  The company indigenously developed ECG monitoring device that can be installed at zero cost and charged on a per-patient basis.

The companies were judged on various parameters including impact on India’s masses, leadership and team, innovation, business model and presentation quality.

There were 130 scrutinised competition applications out of which 10 health-tech startups that participated in the final online pitched to an industry jury.

The seed stage India venture fund had announced the entry open for StartHealth Competition for healthtech startups in India in May this year. The nationwide challenge was started to identify promising early-stage health-tech startups focused on serving India’s 20 Cr families living on under INR 20,000 per month. The program is aimed to provide up to US$1.57Mn (INR 10 Cr) in grants and investments to every early stage startup seeking to enhance access to affordable technology driven healthcare products and services for the low-income masses in India.

Unitus Seed Fund is a $23 Mn seed stage India venture fund that invests in startups innovating for the masses in India. Prior to this, the seed fund along with Sylvant had announced StartEdu, a nationwide program to identify, support, and invest in the most promising early-stage education startups. The seed fund had also received funding from Pramod Bhasin and Vikram Gandhi to invest in startups, which have potential to reduce poverty. So far, it has invested in startups like Jiffstore, Curiositi and Cue Learn Pvt. Ltd.