Radiology platform 5C Network raises seed funding

Bengaluru-based radiology platform 5C Network (India) Pvt. Ltd has raised an undisclosed seed amount from Unitus Ventures, Axilor Ventures, and the Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), which comes under the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.

Radiology is the study and use of different types of radiation in medicine, to treat and diagnose diseases.

5C Network helps hospitals and diagnostics centres get in touch with radiologists, said Syed Ahmed, co-founder and director of the medical platform, in a release by CIIE.

5C Network allows hospitals and diagnostics centres to upload scans to the cloud where automated data extraction and analysis is done by its proprietary algorithm.

“The curated information, with pre-filled reports, is generated, which is then accessed by radiologists,” the release added.

Milind Shah, venture partner at Unitus Ventures, said, "India's radiologist-to-population ratio is extremely low, that is, 1/100,000, which leads to long lead time in analysing and reporting on X-rays and scans. 5C Network is a 24/7 radiology service platform that delivers quality reports within an hour.”

Prachi Sinha, lead of healthcare investments at Axilor Ventures, said, “There are fewer than 10 radiologists per million (compared to globally prescribed standard of 60-70 per million). 5C Network is overcoming this challenge at scale by improving access to radiologists and making geography irrelevant.”

Incorporated in 2014, 5C Network was founded by Kalyan Sivasailam and Syed Ahmed. Sivasailam holds a computer science engineering degree from a National Institute of Technology. Ahmed, a postgraduate from the Indian Institute of Science, had stints at Value Point Systems and Mindlance India.

5C Network claims to handle more than 950 cases per day. In the next two years, the startup plans to reach over 1,000 hospitals and have over 200 radiologists on its platform. Currently, 5C Network has partnered 190 hospitals and has 97 radiologists on its platform.

Investors

CIIE is a technology business incubator. Last October, it had made a seed investment in agri-tech company Sattvaponics.

Axilor Ventures is an early-stage investor and accelerator. Axilor’s founding partners are Infosys founders Kris Gopalakrishnan and SD Shibulal, former Infosys executive Srinath Batni, Axilor chief executive Ganapathy Venugopal and Tarun Khanna.

Last year, Axilor had launched a Rs 200 crore (around $30 million) seed fund.

Unitus Ventures is a social impact investor. It marked the first close of its second fund at Rs 100 crore ($15 million) in April last year.

Last month, VCCircle reported Unitus had invested in education financing startup Eduvanz Financing.