Niramai, early detection of breast abnormalities
NIRAMAI has raised $7M in total. We talk with Dr. Geetha Manjunath, the cofounder, CEO and CTO of NIRAMAI health analytix. She holds a PhD from Indian Institute of Science and has over 25 years of expertise in the IT innovation at Hewlett Packard Labs and Xerox Research. She has proposed and led multiple research projects in Artificial intelligence, mobile, and distributed computing. Her research in the above areas has resulted in innovative prototypes, patents, publications, new products, and many national and international recognitions. She cofounded NIRAMAI along with Nidhi Mathur in July 2016, when she saw two of her close family members suffer from breast cancer in their late 30s.
PetaCrunch: How would you describe Niramai in a single tweet?
Geetha Manjunath: Early detection of breast abnormalities in a completely privacy aware manner.
PC: How did it all start and why?
GM: I was a Senior Director in a corporate research lab working on multiple interesting usecases of AI with my team. The trigger to start working on this technology research problem was actually when I lost two of my young cousin sisters to breast cancer due to late detection. When I researched on this issue, I found out about thermography which had the ability to detect abnormalities in all age groups, but had accuracy issues. I created a small team to explore use of machine learning algorithms to address that gap, and when I started seeing early promising results, decided to do this full time and founded NIRAMAI with some of my earlier team members Nidhi, Himanshu and Siva.
PC: What have you achieved so far?
GM: Niramai now has over 30 installations at hospitals and diagnostic centres across 10 Indian cities. We have screened over 12000 women so far. The innovative methods used in NIRAMAI’s solution have led to 9 US patents and 1 in Canada. We have also conducted employee wellness camps with 20+ corporates. We partner with NGOs and cancer societies to conduct free screening camps for the underprivileged. We obtained permission to conduct the screening test in government hospitals in Bangalore as well as a few other states. Most importantly, we now have a bright team of 20+ innovators and an able leadership team.
NIRAMAI has won several national and international awards. We have received support from BIRAC, Karnataka Startup and recognition from Accenture, Philips, Google and Amazon as one of the top startups. We won the Best Preventive Insurance Idea award in Milan and the Gold prize in Hack Osaka 2019 International competition held in Japan. We are very proud to be the only Indian company listed in the 2019 cohort of AI 100 startups in the world by global business data intelligence platform CB Insights.
PC: How will you use your recent funding round?
GM: Our Series A funding is being used for scaling our operations in India, hiring top talent, and getting the international regulatory approvals.
PC: What do you plan to achieve in the next 2–3 years?
GM: NIRAMAI is a unique non-invasive, safe solution for early detection of breast abnormalities in women of all age groups. There is a need to create awareness about the need for preventative screening in women. Our single goal in the next few years to spread this awareness and enable more number of women to get access to our solution across multiple cities. We would love to partner with corporate employee welfare organizations, insurance providers, large hospital and diagnostic chains to take it to many urban women. We would also like to work with community outreach entities, NGOs and cancer societies to conduct population screening in rural areas and enable affordable healthcare to the under privileged. Our vision is to help every woman do a screening early and address any issue, rather than wait for a lump or another symptom.
