Lightspeed has doubled down on its focus on generative AI and AI-backed startups, investing $1.1 billion across 61 AI companies globally
Team Lightspeed: (standing, from left) Dev Khare, India partner, Bejul Somaia, global partner, Rahul Taneja and Shuvi Shrivastava, India partners; (sitting) Harsha Kumar and Hemant Mohapatra, India partners
Image: Mexy Xavier
It was in March 2023 when Prashant Warier, co-founder of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered healthtech startup Qure.ai, met venture capital (VC) firm Lightspeed India Partners’ senior associate Shreyam Desai at a portfolio-investor event, Lift Off, hosted by Lightspeed. Conversations continued for a year, leading to a meeting with Lightspeed India’s partner Dev Khare and the team.
Warier—whose Qure.ai touches over 12 million lives across 90 countries—answered some hard questions on their technology adoption, commercial use cases, global market approach, competition and the stickiness of its customers. Qure.ai works with leading giants AstraZeneca and Medtronic in the medical space.
“The fresh investment tells us that we have a really solid story around AI,” Warier tells Forbes India. Qure.ai processes globally 12 million scans a year, of which five million are TB related, and around three million are lung cancer related. It has a hub-and-spoke model where, through a mobile app, the patient comes to the spoke hospital, gets a scan done and after AI processes the CT scan in less than a minute, the hub hospital is alerted about the diagnosis. Doctors at both the hub and the spoke coordinate to ensure the patient receives the diagnosis and treatment much faster.
(This story appears in the 04 October, 2024 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)