Healthcare Analytics Startup Tricog Raises Series A Funding From Blume, Inventus And Others

Tricog Health, a Bangalore-based healthcare analytics company has raised an undisclosed amount in Series A round of funding. The investment was led by Inventus Capital Partners, Blume Ventures and a host of angel investors.

The raised funds will be used to further develop technology and market reach of the company.

Tricog Health was founded in January 2015 by Dr. Charit Bhograj along with Dr. Zainul Charbiwala, Abhinav Gujjar, and Dr. Udayan Dasgupta. It aims to help preserve people’s lives through technology. Its solution includes installing a cloud-connected ECG machine in primary and secondary care medical centres – clinics, polyclinics, nursing homes, and hospitals. The collected information is then sent to a centrally located hub for further analysis and report is received through an SMS or a mobile app notification.

To date, Tricog has expanded to close to 250 clinics, nursing homes and hospitals in 12 cities and towns, both urban and rural. According to the company, almost 100K patients have been diagnosed since inception, over 5000 of whom were found with acute heart conditions that required urgent intervention. It plans to expand to cover all major cities and towns during 2016-17.

Charit further hopes that this tech can expand to personal health and wearable devices. While Tricog primarily works with heart-related issues, the company’s aim is to eventually extend to using tech to detect and help manage several ailments.

“Machine learning, and associated technologies, are increasingly being deployed for large, multi-disciplinary, data-intensive problems. The team we are backing at Tricog is amongst the most balanced we have come across at a Series A stage company. We look forward to partnering with the Tricog team to build a large and sustainable enterprise.” said Parag Dhol, Managing Director, Inventus.

“Tricog’s aim is to change that patient’s 80% chance of death to an 80% chance of staying alive,” said Dr. Charit.

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%.

The key to scaling the service are machine learning and signal processing algorithms that ease interpretation for the doctors. Sanjay Nath, Managing Director of Blume believes that Tricog’s deep data and algorithm-driven platform, augmented by a communicator (a proprietary hardware device manufactured by them) can reach patients in urban areas, Tier II and III cities, and even remote locations.

Other startups in this space include Uber Diagnostics,  iMMi Life and more.