How Niramai's Test Addresses The Socio-Cultural Issues In Cancer Screening For Indian Women

Bengaluru-based startup Niramai was incorporated in July 2016 by two women founders, Dr Geetha Manjunath and Nidhi Mathur, who wanted to productise and take to market a novel idea that they were developing since 2014 as an exploratory project in a multinational research lab observes, Sandhya Michu.

- Sandhya Michu

Concept and roll out

The first big challenge we faced, was the funds needed to own the intellectual property, since the initial IP was developed by us when we were employees of our previous organization. We had to raise a seed round within three months in order to ensure that Niramai could own the IP. We were happy to secure the backing from our investors such as piVentures, Ankur Capital, Axilor Ventures and 500 startups without whom this wouldn’t have been possible.

Challenges

The key challenge we are addressing was to enable early screening of breast cancer for all women. Current technologies for detecting breast cancer do not work on women under 45 years of age, they are not suitable for frequent screening and also not accessible to many women. We have developed a new way of doing breast cancer screening in a privacy aware manner, in women of all age groups, more accurately than standard methods. A key challenge we faced was to prove the clinical validity of the solution and get acceptance from medical community. We worked with major hospitals in India to conduct clinical trials and publish in international journals in order to establish the efficacy of the solution. The results from these trials have helped us gain the trust of expert radiologists and product roll out.

Product and solution offerings