Medical Wearable Device Startup ten3T Raises Funding from ITI Growth Opportunities Fund, pi Ventures

ten3T Healthcare, a health technology startup based in Bengaluru announced that it has raised undisclosed amount in a pre Series A round of funding led by the ITI Growth Opportunities Fund, an early stage venture capital fund of the Investment Trust of India group, with participation from earlier investors pi Ventures and previous angel investors.

The funds will be used to expand the usage of their revolutionary product, Cicer, to home care scenarios, ambulance monitoring, and pharmacovigilance studies. More than 10,000 patient hours of monitoring at hospitals and at home have already been completed using Cicer, covering more than 750 hospital beds.

Prominent angel investors who participated include Bhupen Shah (valley based angel, co-founder of Sling Media), Raghu Tarra (valley based angel, founding member of Sling Media), Krishna Prasad Chitrapura and Raghavendra Prasad (co-founders of QikWell), Dr. Vijay Chandru (co-founder of Strand Life Sciences), Deepinder Singh Dhingra (serial angel investor, chief product officer at Noodle.ai and advisor for AI/ML), Ikuto Higashi (serial angel investor in healthcare startups in the US, Japan, and India), and Rama Voruganti (a senior technologist). pi Ventures had led the company’s first round of investment in December 2016.

ten3T has commercialized patented technology for the early detection and prevention of medical episodes to patients in hospitals, during transport, and at home. Every day, more than 6000 patients experience preventable medical episodes in India. Early warning signs for these episodes show up in patient’s vitals data, hours and days before time. A majority of these patients are not monitored due to the limitations of existing monitoring platforms. ten3T’s Cicer solves this problem using clinical grade wearables, proprietary IoT technology, and predictive analytics that alert physicians and patient’s families of impending events before they happen. ten3T was recently chosen by Google to be among the top machine learning startups in India.

At the core of ten3T’s revolutionary technology is the Cicer patch, a palm sized sticker that continuously measures a patient’s vitals and presents the data to physician smartphones in as low as 4 seconds, on any smart device, anywhere in the world. The patch measures 6 leads of ECG, heart rate, respiration, patient posture and falls. The Cicer system also captures blood oxygen saturation and blood pressure. The real-time data is fed into machine learning algorithms that identify patterns in the patient’s vital signs and send timely lifesaving alerts.

ten3T was founded by Rahul Shingrani, a biomedical engineering graduate of Mumbai and Marquette University with significant experience in medical innovations at the leading medical technology firms such as Siemens, Philips, J&J, and Medtronic; Prasad Bhat, a biomedical engineer with industry leading expertise in regulatory and quality systems for medical devices, and Dr. Sudhir Borgonha, a physician and an entrepreneur (graduate of St. John’s Medical College, Bangalore and the Sloan School of Management, MIT).

Rahul Shingrani, co-founder and CEO, ten3T, said, “Patient care continues to be reactionary and episodic, with the health system’s focus on managing episodes such as heart attacks after the traumatic event. This places a large medical and financial burden on the patient, their family, and the overall system. This needs to change. Technology allows us to monitor patients anywhere and everywhere, and advances in AI enables us to pick up subtle patterns in the patient’s vitals data. For every prevented episode, we can minimise the lifelong consequences to a patient and their family."

Mohit Gulati, Founding Partner,ITI, said, “Coming from a medtech background, we as a team see greater advancements in Indian healthcare in the decade up ahead. We thereby look to invest in companies in disruptive spaces and ten3T’s device, Cicer will make traditional methods of post ICU care more easy, accessible and smart. We believe in a country like India, adoption and usage of any medical device increases with ease of use of the device and its affordability. ten3T has ticked all boxes and we hope to soon see it in every hospital and patient’s homes."

Manish Singhal, Founding Partner, pi Ventures, added, “ten3T brings together the best of the IoT technology and AI algorithms to create a world class product, Cicer for continuous monitoring. This is an emerging space and we believe that a product like Cicer can open up several interesting applications in Drug Trials, Up/ Down ICUs, home monitoring, monitoring on the move like in ambulances, etc. We wish them all the very best. “

ten3T delivers data driven clinical insights using its patented platform of intelligent, medical grade wearables for continuous vitals monitoring and proprietary health analytics to enable predictive, proactive, and effective clinical decisions. Towards this, ten3T has commercialised its AI driven, real time monitoring platform that is in use at multiple hospitals across India.

Launched in November 2018, the Investment Trust of India group started an early stage venture capital fund — ITI Growth Opportunities Fund, with a target corpus of USD 21 Mn (INR 150 Cr) for the fund. As an early-stage enabler, the fund is sector agnostic, with preference to be the first institutional investor backing entrepreneurs building sustainable disruptive businesses.

ten3T, Medical Grade Wearable Device Startup, Raises Seed Funding Led by Pi Ventures

Bangalore based medical grade wearable device startup, ten3T announced that it 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 angel investors from the Valley and Bangalore. ten3T has developed its first wearable medical device ‘Cicer’, which will make cardiac health easily accessible to everyone.

ten3T builds wearable medical devices that collects and integrates medical grade data in real time. Besides manufacturing the devices, it deploys, manages and analyzes 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 analyzed and reported in real time. ten3T will manage and analyze the continually streaming data on an intelligent cloud based platform to provide accurate medical grade data to doctors with analytics and predictive modeling. ten3T will be an end-to-end operator of the real time ECG monitoring business – building the hardware, software, data storage and data analytics.

ten3T founding team comes with rich experience in medical and biomedical fields. It is co-founded by Dr. Sudhir Borgonha, a physician and an entrepreneur (graduate of St. John’s Medical College, Bangalore and the Sloan School of Management, MIT) and two biomedical engineers - Rahul Shingrani, (Marquette University) comes with years of research and development experience in the medical device space and Prasad Bhat who has experience in regulatory and quality systems in medical devices.

Dr. Sudhir Borgonha, Co-founder & CEO, ten3T, says, “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.”

Manish Singhal, Founding Partner of pi Ventures, adds, “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.”

The funds will be deployed to beta test the company’s first device, Cicer in multiple healthcare settings, including doctors in private practice, nursing homes and for at-home monitoring.

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. 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.

Rahul Shingrani, Co-founder & CTO, says, “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”.

In India, given the fact that 30% of deaths are caused with cardiac issues at the core and lack of an adequate number of cardiologists, we are on our way to claiming the unfortunate distinction of being the cardiovascular disease capital of the world with 70 million cases by 2025. As such we need to find unique ways to accurately monitor and diagnose cardiac function. ten3T will do just that by being an end-to-end operator of the real time ECG monitoring business – building the hardware, software, data storage and data analytics.