Medical Wearable Device Startup ten3T Raises Seed Funding From pi Ventures And Others

Bengaluru-based medical grade wearable device startup, ten3T has raised an angel round of funding from pi Ventures. The round also saw participation by a group of angels, including V. Krishna Prasad, co-Founder of Qikwel, Bhupen Shah and other angels from Silicon Valley and Bengaluru.

Co-founded by Dr. Sudhir Borgonha, Rahul Shingrani, and Prasad Bhat, ten3T builds wearable medical devices that collect and integrates medical grade data in real time. It has developed its first wearable medical device ‘Cicer’, which will make cardiac health easily accessible to everyone.

Cicer monitors real-time ECG, respiration, pulse and temperature and streams them simultaneously in real-time to the doctor’s tablet and the nursing station. This empowers a number of smaller nursing homes without an ICU to offer ICU equivalent services when patients are walking around or even in their homes.

Manish Singhal, Founding Partner of pi Ventures said, “We are very excited to partner with the talented team at ten3T. Sudhir and his team have done some path breaking work in bringing out a compact and medical grade device. We believe that Cicer will make ECG and cardiac health monitoring easy, intelligent and more accessible for all, across India and globally. At pi Ventures, we are looking to support disruptive product companies in the Applied AI, ML and IoT space and ten3T presents a very compelling case.”

Cicer can be used to get a Spot ECG i.e. an instant reading or can be worn for hours (similar to a Holter monitor). The device is a self-enclosed, wireless 9 cm wide smart patch that is held against the chest for 20 seconds to generate an instant ECG or worn for several hours for continuous monitoring.

The funds will be deployed to beta test Cicer in multiple healthcare settings, including doctors in private practice, nursing homes and for at-home monitoring. “Being self-enclosed, the device requires little training. Collecting large volumes of clinical grade data will help us build predictive tools, bringing artificial intelligence into the clinic,” said Rahul.

Besides manufacturing the devices, ten3T deploys, manages, and analyses the data with predictive functioning. Each wearable device will include multiple sensors to collect clinical grade data, continuously streaming signals from ECG, pulse, SpO₂, respiratory rate and temperature – all gathered within 30 seconds, all analysed and reported in real-time.

ten3T will manage and analyse the continually streaming data on an intelligentcloud-basedd platform to provide accurate medical grade data to doctors with analytics and predictive modeling. It will be an end-to-end operator of the real time ECG monitoring business – building the hardware, software, data storage and data analytics.

Co-founder Dr. Sudhir said, “Medical care continues to be traditionally managed. With technological advances, there is an urgent need to build more powerful diagnostic capabilities coupled with interpretative tools. ten3T integrates its proprietary hardware and software to build convenience, cost benefits and intelligent reporting to the physician and patient. It is our vision to make cardiac care preventive, predictive and accessible to all.”

In India alone, 5 Mn people suffer heart attacks every year and 3 Mn of them don’t survive. The average time it takes to diagnose a heart attack in urban India is 360 mins. The chances of survival with this delay is a mere 20%. If this delay were reduced to 90 min, the survival probability jumps to 80%.

Earlier in August 2016, Tricog Health, a Bengaluru-based healthcare analytics company, which provides cloud-connected ECG machine in primary and secondary care medical centres, raised an undisclosed amount in Series A round of funding.

Other similar products in this space are credit-card sized heart monitor called ‘Sanket’, acting like a portable, economical ECG machine; Cardiac Design Labs, which has built a low-cost, wearable cardiac monitor, Mircam; AliveCor, available in India through the Apollo Group of Hospitals; Kito+, launched by a San Francisco-based company Azio and more.

pi Ventures is India’s first applied artificial intelligence, machine learning & IoT-focussed early stage venture fund, founded by Manish Singhal (ex-co-founder & CEO, LetsVenture and prominent angel investor) and Umakant Soni (ex-Director India, Science Inc & Co-founder AI BOT company, 2010). pi Ventures focusses on healthcare, logistics, retail, fintech, and enterprise sectors.

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