From new AI tools and regulatory clearances to strategic pivots and partnerships, healthtech is evolving. Here’s a look at some of the developments shaping the industry right now.
Practo founder launches preventive health startup Cent
Practo founder Shashank ND, along with Arpit Garg (ex-Lenskart) and Anshul Khandelwal (ex-Ola Electric), has launched a new healthtech startup called Cent, focused on AI-driven early disease detection.
According to Inc42 Media, it has recently raised about $5 million in seed funding from OneFlow Holdings (Shashank ND’s family office) and venture firm South Park Commons.
Cent is building a direct-to-consumer preventive health intelligence platform, a full-stack screening system designed to identify serious conditions before symptoms show up.
At the core is its CCNM protocol (Cardiac, Cancer, Neurological, Metabolic), which combines:
- Whole-body MRI
- Low-dose CT scans
- ECG and DEXA scans
- 120+ blood and urine biomarkers
- AI-driven analysis of all results
Together, these tools can screen for 300+ conditions in a single visit, followed by a clinical consultation.
Cent has been operating quietly since early FY26, completing over 1,500 scans. According to the company, 26% of scans revealed clinically meaningful findings, while about 4% detected critical conditions requiring immediate medical attention, often in people who had no symptoms.
The startup aims to build dedicated early-detection screening centres across major Indian cities as it scales.
Microsoft introduces Copilot Health
Microsoft has joined the latest spree of tech giants launching GenAI chatbots for healthcare. But with a slightly different approach.
While OpenAI and Amazon have released consumer-focused chatbots, Microsoft is joining enterprise AI players like Google and Anthropic, building AI systems designed primarily for physicians and healthcare professionals.
With the launch of Copilot Health, Microsoft is positioning its AI assistant as a clinical support tool to help doctors make sense of the growing volume of patient data.
Copilot Health can integrate information from electronic health records, lab results, imaging reports, and even wearable data, and then use generative AI to summarise insights, surface relevant information, and assist with documentation.
The tool is meant to augment clinicians by helping them prepare for consultations, navigate patient histories faster, and reduce administrative workload.
Verily and Samsung partner to accelerate digital health research
Continuing the theme of tech companies pushing deeper into healthcare, another interesting collaboration emerged this week.
Verily, Alphabet’s life sciences arm, has partnered with Samsung Electronics to bring wearable data into clinical research.
As a part of this partnership, Samsung Galaxy Watch’s sensor data will integrate with Verily’s Pre precision health platform. The idea is to help pharma companies, researchers, and health organisations run clinical studies using real-world health data collected from participants in their daily lives.
Signals captured by the Galaxy Watch, such as heart rate, sleep, activity levels, blood oxygen, and body composition, will flow directly into Verily’s research infrastructure.
There, they can be combined with medical records, surveys, and other datasets and analysed through Verily’s Viewpoint Evidence system to create a more complete picture of patient health.
This will enable study sponsors to monitor participants and analyse longitudinal health data over time.
Another interesting aspect is scale. Verily can recruit participants from its existing registries and combine them with Samsung wearable users, creating large cohorts that researchers can follow and re-contact for future studies.
Sword Health launches Dawn, a D2C mental health service
Another interesting move came from Sword Health.
The company, best known for its virtual musculoskeletal (MSK) care programs, has launched Dawn. It’s first direct-to-consumer mental health service.
The idea builds on Sword’s observations that physical pain and mental health are closely connected. People dealing with chronic pain often experience anxiety, stress, or depression alongside it, which can make recovery harder.
Dawn aims to address that gap with an always-on AI-supported mental health experience. The platform combines AI guidance with clinical oversight and can even integrate signals from a user’s devices and calendar to provide real-time support and awareness, especially during stressful moments.
This launch is part of Sword’s broader strategy to expand beyond a single condition and build AI-led speciality care across multiple health areas.
The company, valued at around $4 Bn, already serves hundreds of thousands of members globally and is increasingly positioning AI as the coordination layer between patients, clinicians, and care programs.
Ultrasound AI receives FDA De Novo clearance
Ultrasound AI, a startup applying AI to pregnancy ultrasound analysis, received U.S. FDA De Novo clearance for its flagship product, Delivery Date AI.
This is notable because the De Novo pathway is reserved for entirely new categories of medical devices. It means there was no existing benchmark product to compare it to.
Delivery Date AI is a cloud-based AI software that predicts a baby’s expected delivery date (EDD) using standard ultrasound images.
Traditionally, due dates are estimated using the last menstrual period or manual ultrasound measurements. Both of which can be inaccurate when patients’ history is unclear.
The AI model, trained on large datasets of ultrasound scans, analyses fetal development patterns to provide real-time, more precise estimates within existing clinical workflows. It acts as a decision-support tool for clinicians.
Elo Health expands into B2B nutrition
Elo Health, the D2C personalised nutrition startup, is adding a new B2B vertical.
It will now partner with clinics, digital health platforms, and wellness brands to help them offer science-backed, personalised supplements to their patients and users.
The model is straightforward: Elo handles the science, formulation, manufacturing, and logistics, while partners own the patient relationship and distribution.
They’re already focusing on high-demand areas like:
- GLP-1 companion nutrition: supplements designed for patients on drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro
- Sleep: gummies personalised using sleep data
- Fertility: doctor-formulated nutraceuticals already used across 100+ clinics
According to Ari Tulla, co-founder of Elo Health, many clinics and health platforms want to offer nutrition products but lack the scientific, regulatory, and supply chain capabilities to do it right. Elo is positioning itself as the backend infrastructure to enable that.
Bingli receives EU approval for AI clinical assessment platform
Bingli received EU MDR Class IIa certification and CE marking, allowing it to deploy its AI solution across European healthcare systems.
This is a big deal because the EU MDR (Medical Device Regulation) is one of the strictest regulatory frameworks globally for AI in healthcare. To get this approval, Bingli underwent a multi-year evaluation covering clinical performance, risk management, and quality systems.
Bingli’s AI-powered clinical assessment platform conducts structured, digital medical interviews with patients before they meet a doctor.
Based on patient inputs, the system organises medical history, generates potential diagnoses, risk scores, and care pathways, and hands that over to clinicians ahead of the consultation.
It reduces time spent on intake and helps doctors start with better, more structured information.
With this approval, Bingli can now be used across hospitals, virtual care platforms, and triage workflows in Europe, where efficient patient intake and decision support are becoming increasingly important.
India launches its first dedicated MedTech Capital Fund
India’s medtech ecosystem got a major boost this week with the launch of the country’s first dedicated MedTech Capital Fund. This is a big step toward strengthening domestic innovation and manufacturing.
The fund, led by MedArtha Capital in partnership with Andhra Pradesh MedTech Zone (AMTZ), is targeting a corpus of around ₹1,000 crore, focused exclusively on medical technology companies.
Unveiled in Mumbai by Union Minister Piyush Goyal, the initiative is designed to provide financial, strategic and operational support to emerging medtech startups.
The fund aims to:
- Back growth-stage medtech companies ready to scale
- Strengthen R&D and domestic manufacturing capabilities
- Reduce India’s dependence on imported medical devices
- Build globally competitive medtech companies from India
India’s medtech market is rapidly growing, but still heavily reliant on imports. This fund signals a shift from import dependence to building and scaling indigenous innovation.
With capital becoming more sector-specific in Indian healthcare, we’re likely to see more specialised funds targeting healthcare sub-sectors in the coming times.
Andhra Pradesh brings AI into government hospitals
India’s push toward AI in healthcare is also showing up at the state level.
The Government of Andhra Pradesh has rolled out a pilot program deploying AI technologies across 18 government hospitals, aimed at improving diagnosis and treatment outcomes.
Here’s what’s happening on the ground:
- Around 40 AI-powered devices are being deployed
- Covering screening and diagnosis for ~15 diseases
- Including cervical cancer, heart disease, TB, anaemia, cataract, glaucoma, and neurological disorders
These tools will help doctors detect conditions earlier, reduce diagnostic delays, and improve accuracy, especially in high-volume public hospitals.
The approach stands out for two reasons:
- Solutions are coming from startups, not just large tech players
- Focus is on real clinical use cases, not just pilots on paper
The pilot is already live across major government hospitals in cities like Visakhapatnam, Guntur, Vijayawada, and Kakinada, with plans to be deployed elsewhere soon.
If scaled effectively, this could become a blueprint for how AI is integrated into public healthcare systems across India.
The bigger picture
Taken together, these developments show how:
- Prevention is becoming mainstream in healthcare
- Tech giants are narrowing down on the health sector
- Data from wearables is being integrated into clinical research
- Infrastructure and B2B models are quietly powering the ecosystem
- Governments are moving from AI policy to implementation
Healthcare is being restructured at every layer.
