South African medtech company AI Diagnostics has announced that it has secured R85 million in funding.
The funding came through a Pre-Series A funding round led by The Steel Foundation for Hope. IFSP Group, Global Innovation Fund and early angel investors also contributed significantly.
AI Diagnostics hopes to solve one of the most neglected problems we still face as a society – Tuberculosis (TB). Despite being treatable and preventable, An estimated 10.7 million people fell ill with TBAnd in 2024, 1.23 million people died from this disease.
The Ostium digital stethoscope, manufactured by AI Diagnostics, aims to make it easier for medical professionals to detect TB early. This is accomplished through the aforementioned stethoscope as well as the AID.APP application and the medtech firm's proprietary tuberculosis detection model AID.TB.
Together, this solution is able to detect if a patient's lungs are exhibiting symptoms similar to those of a TB patient.
“The AI model flags individuals whose lung sounds have signs associated with TB in real-time so that healthcare providers can immediately refer them for diagnostic testing,” says Braden van Breda, CEO of AI Diagnostics. “For health systems trying to close the detection gap, this changes the availability and geography of screening.”
The funding the medtech company has secured will help accelerate the deployment of the solution and scale the business in Southern Africa and Asia.
This is an important milestone for AI Diagnostics which was established in 2020.
“We support the tech entrepreneurs who are closest to the problems they are solving, and AI Diagnostics is a clear example of why this matters,” says Joe Exner, CEO of Steel Foundation for Hope. “They have created innovative hardware: an AI-enabled digital stethoscope that detects TB through lung sound analysis with point-of-care accuracy that was not possible before. In communities without X-ray infrastructure or specialist physicians, it puts real diagnostic capability in the hands of nurses and community health workers.”
As author John Green very helpfully points out in the video above, the fact that so many people die from TB and that it is treatable is madness. Thankfully, we have companies like AI Diagnostics that are working to catch and treat the disease early.
The fact that the company has secured such a large amount of money shows that there is some will to tackle this disease.
Last year, researchers at Wits University announced that they had created a microscopic capsule to store all four important drugs needed to fight TB, which would be delivered through inhalation therapy. It is believed that delivering these drugs directly to the lungs will fight TB faster, reduce side effects and limit the chance of the bacteria becoming resistant.
Perhaps we will see an end to TB, which kills millions in our lifetime, as more people work to fight the disease.
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