South African e-health startup VitruvianMD has raised an eight-figure ZAR – so at least ZAR10 million (US$659,000) – funding round in order to scale its tech and launch more pilots.
Founded last year, VitruvianMD combines biomedical engineering and state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver affordable, high-accuracy diagnostic tools for medical laboratories, with a particular focus on servicing emerging markets.
“The core of our business is delivering AI-powered diagnostic software into under-resourced areas, and to date we have built a platform that enables this in various fields of pathology. To further facilitate access, we have also developed a low-cost, high quality camera that can retrofit any microscope instantly enabling digital tele-pathology,” Ifthakaar Shaik, VitruvianMD’s co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO), told Disrupt Africa.
“Our platform is robust enough to be utilised in any form of microscopy based diagnostics, and is proved by our pilots in haematology, histopathology, fertility and parasitology.”
VitruvianMD’s eight-figure ZAR funding round was led by the Singapore-based Verge Healthtech Fund and also features a host of angel investors. It will be used to accelerate the development of the startup’s technology and to fund the roll-out of additional pilots.
“With this funding, the goal is to reach commercialisation of at least one of our diagnostic modules within the next 18 months,” Shaik said.
