Decoding Startups - NIRAMAI

Hey guys,

In our last post, we covered a really exciting and emerging industry – Femtech. More than 1550 companies have ventured into this space globally and generated $820.6 million in revenue. We had highlighted four emerging start-ups in this space - Sanfe, NIRAMAI , OoWomaniya, and Celes Care, unaware of the fact that we would get a chance to speak to one of the Founders and cover their journey.

Well, any guesses?

The entrepreneur that we are talking about here is Dr. Geetha Manjunath - Founder and CEO of NIRAMAI. To say the least, her story is incredibly inspiring. At the age when we slowly dose into our comfort zone, she dared to do something different and immensely valuable.

Being a techie at heart, she started her career journey with CDAC and grew up to be in the leadership team of Xerox Research Centre India as Lab Director (Data Analytics). With more than 20 years of work experience and being in a C-suite position, the typical route is to move up the corporate ladder, but life throws curveballs when you expect them the least. While working at a multinational company, her routine work involved developing various innovations to solve exciting global problems. Her life took an unpredictable turn when she lost her two cousins due to late-stage detection of breast cancer. The trauma of losing your loved ones is not easy - she observed their families getting impacted closely. 

To contextualize how big the problem is, close to 1.5 lakh women are impacted every year due to breast cancer, and mortality rates are high due to late detection and diagnosis even when this disease is curable. As per TOI, almost 50 per cent of breast cancer patients first visit the doctor when they are in stage 3, and 15-20% of patients visit when they are in phase 4. In one study, scientists estimated that 10-year survival rates for women fell from 75 percent for stage 1 breast cancer patients to 5 percent for phase 4 patients.

Where women share close to 48% of the population - their health and wellbeing should be the utmost priority for the economy. It's very fundamental to the development of the nation, we feel!

The GAP

While working at a multinational company, she started studying this problem with three of her teammates and identified that the current method of detecting breast cancer, Mammography, does not work for women under 45 years of age. The existing X-Ray method is excruciating, invasive, expensive, and has low accuracy.

The Breakthrough

She asked one question – when every small problem is solved through AI and ML globally, why not EARLY DETECTION of breast cancer and hence the name NIRAMAI - Non-Invasive Risk Assessment with Machine Intelligence. The team developed a novel software-based medical solution for the early detection of breast cancer. The core technology of their unique solution Thermalytix has been advanced using machine learning algorithms.

Citing herself as an accidental entrepreneur, she started the venture in 2017, and the very first challenge for her was to get funding. While pitching her idea to investors, she was questioned on her capability, commitment, and consistency. Despite this, the deal was closed within a month and the company onboarded pi Ventures as their investor.

Early adopters 

They started collaborating with cancer treatment hospitals and convinced them to deploy their technology. The early adopters were BMS Hospital, HCG Cancer Care Hospital, and Karnataka Cancer society. The results were promising, with over 95% accuracy. The excruciating process of breast cancer diagnosis was now a contactless and radiation-free process. For people encountering the product, it seemed like magic. The founder stated that the trust of early adopters is instrumental in expanding the customer base. They have come a long way, close to 5 years, and screened about 38,000 women till now.

Covid and Pivots 

Revenue should be at least flat if not growing to keep the business up and running. During the pandemic, the start-up did just one screening in April 2020. All the operations were halted, but as they say, winners are those who navigate through difficult times and never give up. The team started looking for opportunities, and they discovered that thermal screening is mandatory in every government office, every workplace! Well, NIRAMAI is an expert in thermal screening, and it was time to leverage it. Within 15 days, they build a product – a passive screening device for Covid fever to help the nation fight Covid. Her mentor, Kiran Majumdar Shaw, deployed the device in the Biocon office and post that the team started selling it. Now it's a full-fledged product for NIRAMAI that is bringing a good chunk of revenues.

The other prospective opportunity that they tapped was breast cancer screening at home. It was more of a B2B to B2C pivot, and rightly so because people were confined in their houses. Besides focusing on organic strategies to scale up the product adoption, they also relied on inorganic traction through webinars on women's health, partnerships with insurance vendors, and asked corporates to start with home-screening facilities for their employees.

What's next?

But as they say – great things build over time, and the vision of NIRAMAI is to be present within reach of 100 km of each Indian household and take the made-in-India product to change the world. It will be exciting to see the footmarks of NIRAMAI across India and globally. The underlying purpose of the start-up is, in fact, a blessing for humanity and a phenomenal product that we need for other cancer treatments as well. 

Authors: Nikita Aggarwal, Komal Kumari

Why are we doing this?

As business management students, we keep reading theories, principles, and General Gyan about businesses. But all this comes with caution! Caution of copy-paste, pick and apply because businesses do not work like that. So, to connect our learnings with the business world, we came up with a simple vision of Decoding Successful Start-ups and their Strategies.

You can write to us at decodingsuccessfulstartups@gmail.com.