Medical-tech startup SigTuple raises Series C funding for new lines of business

Medical-technology startup SigTuple Technologies Pvt. Ltd has raised $19 million (around Rs 132 crore at current exchange rate) in a Series C funding round for developing new lines of business.

In a release, SigTuple stated that the round was led by US-based platform for institutional investors Trusted Insight. The round also saw the participation from existing investors including Accel, Chiratae Ventures, Pi Ventures and Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal. As part of the transaction, Bansal will be joining the board of SigTuple.

According to Crunchbase, the data and research platform of TechCrunch, Trusted Insight is an institutional syndication platform for alternative assets, with its members managing over $18 trillion in assets under management.

The current round is likely to become larger with a debt-financing component, which the company is looking to close over the next couple of months. Rohit Kumar Pandey, co-founder and chief executive of SigTuple, told TechCircle that the med-tech firm will raise another larger round by the end of 2019.

Pandey said that the funds from the latest round will be utilised towards new business lines -- Mirable Healthcare Pvt. Ltd and Truelyser.

Mirable, launched in 2018, is a subsidiary of SigTuple. It leverages technologies like artificial intelligence for diagnostics. Humain Diagnostics, which is consumer-facing brand of Mirable, has nine labs in Bengaluru. The company stated it hopes to expand to more than 50 labs across eight cities by the end of this year.

Medyog, the other offering of Mirable, offers doorstep collection of blood and urine samples. Currently operational in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai, the unit hopes to expand to 12 more cities by the end of this year.

Truelyser, which is yet to be formally launched going by its website, aims to manufacture and distribute diagnostic solutions and services.

“Healthcare requires a new infrastructure powered by technology to make it accessible to everyone,” Alex Bangash, founder of Trusted Insights, said.

In June last year, SigTuple had raised $19 million in a Series B round to power the assembly and distribution of its then newly launched diagnostic machine AI100, among other things.

In early 2017, the startup had raised $5.8 million (around Rs 38.8 crore) in a Series A funding.

Prior to that, it had raised $740,000 in 2016 from Flipkart founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, Accel and a few other angel investors.

SigTuple

SigTuple was founded in 2015 by Pandey, Tathagato Rai Dastidar, and Apurv Anand, who previously worked at Big Data Labs of American Express.

The startup builds cloud-based solutions for medical diagnosis using artificial intelligence techniques and has tied up with medical institutions to get data for the analysis. It has around 300 employees, including doctors and data science engineers.

The company's main product is an artificial intelligence solution called Manthana, which processes visual medical data from different devices for diagnosis.

Deals in the health-tech space

• April 2019: Bengaluru-based medical wearable device startup Ten3t Healthcare Pvt. Ltd said it had raised an undisclosed amount in a pre-Series A round led by early-stage ITI Growth Opportunities Venture Fund of Investment Trust of India.
• February 2019: Breast cancer screening startup Niramai Health Analytix Pvt. Ltd raised $6 million in a Series A round of funding led by Tokyo-headquartered management consulting firm Dream Incubator.