Cent, the preventive healthcare startup founded by Practo co-founder Shashank ND, has raised $15 million in a Series A round co-led by Blume Ventures and South Park Commons. The company has also acquired Medsee, an AI radiology platform.
Individual investors in the round included Arun Sarin, Srinivas Narayanan, Sharath Narayana, Aprameya Radhakrishna and Krishan Sridhar. Shashank disclosed the round in a LinkedIn post.
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What Cent Does
Cent runs a single-session screening protocol built around early disease detection. It combines a full-body MRI, low-dose CT scans, a DEXA scan, ECG, ECHO and more than 100 biomarkers into one visit of about two hours.
The output of a Cent screening is not a general health check. The company looks for findings that need attention before symptoms appear, which is where most non-communicable diseases in India are missed.
Cent operates its own screening centres in Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi NCR, alongside a network of partner diagnostic labs it started with. Owning the centres means owning the imaging equipment and the report quality, which is the part partner labs cannot guarantee.
The Numbers From Its First Year
Around 10,000 people have been screened through the protocol in the past year. Of those, one in four had a finding that required medical attention, and one in 40 needed to consult a doctor immediately, according to the company.
Those ratios are the entire pitch. A 25% hit rate sounds high until you consider that Cent screens people who are already worried enough to pay for a full-body scan, which raises the prior probability of a finding.
The company wants 10 million scans by 2035 and says the goal is to help save one million lives through early detection. Both numbers are aspirations, not forecasts, and neither is tied to a timeline investors can hold it to.
Why India Needs This, and Why It Is Hard
India has an estimated 101 million people living with diabetes and 136 million with prediabetes. Around 315 million have hypertension, according to figures Cent cites.
Those conditions are cheap to manage when caught early and expensive to treat once complications set in. But screening at scale runs into two problems: unit economics per scan, and follow-up. Finding a problem is useless if the patient does not act on the report.
Owning centres helps on the first problem, because margin per scan improves with utilisation. The second problem is harder, and it is where most preventive-health businesses quietly fail.
The Medsee Acquisition
Medsee brings AI radiology capability in-house. For a business generating thousands of scans, that matters in two ways: reporting speed and consistency across centres.
Radiologists are the bottleneck in full-body MRI reporting, and a model that pre-reads scans can cut the time per case while flagging what a human should look at first. The fresh capital will go into hardware, AI and clinical research.
What to Watch
Three things will show whether this round built a healthcare business or a premium check-up chain. The first is repeat customers. A screening that people do once is a product; one that they do annually is a business.
Second is what happens after a finding. If Cent can convert detection into treatment pathways with partners, it captures more of the value and improves outcomes. If it only hands over a report, it stays a diagnostics vendor.
Third is the AI claim. Medsee’s models need published accuracy numbers on Indian patient data, not a press release, before they can be trusted with triage.