Healthcare AI start-up Qure.ai has raised $16m in a funding round led by Sequoia India and supported by MassMutual Ventures Southeast Asia. Headquartered in Mumbai, India, with operations in San Francisco and New York, Qure.ai provides fast and accurate interpretations of radiology scans within seconds.

The company will use this capital to drive geographical expansion, expand its product portfolio and support regulatory clearances.

Founded in 2016 by Prashant Warier and Pooja Rao, and incubated by Fractal, Qure.ai has presence in more than 20 countries and has impacted over 600,000 lives. Its technology uses artificial intelligence developed on a database of over seven million scans.

“We are proud to have taken our solutions beyond the research stage to actually impacting patient lives across more than 200 locations in 20 countries,” said Warier. “Our products ensure that life-saving treatments can be delivered to patients, even in remote locations, in a fraction of the time required for traditional scan interpretation. This funding round will allow us to further invest into R&D and to expand the reach of our solutions, accelerating our mission of delivering accessible and affordable healthcare to every human being.”

Qure.ai’s products are all CE certified, their head CT product (qER) is said to be the only such product in the industry to detect every critical brain abnormality on a head CT including five types of intracranial haemorrhages, cranial fractures, infarcts, midline shift, and mass effect for tumour detection.

Its chest x-ray automation and interpretation product (qXR) accurately interprets chest x-rays to help automatically generate chest x-ray interpretation reports, detect tuberculosis (one of the world’s leading infectious killers), chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, lung malignancies and medical emergencies such as lung collapses and cardiac disorders.

“Medical imaging is one of the fields in healthcare where there is enough digitised data to turn the promise of AI into a reality,” said Anjana Sasidharan, principal at Sequoia Capital India. “The sophistication of Qure.ai’s algorithms and predictive analytics tools, coupled with their expert team of data scientists and physicians positions them very well versus their global competitors. What sets them apart is their ability to deploy commercially at scale across multiple countries, something many others have failed to do as strong algorithms don’t always translate to robust commercial products.”

Ryan Collins, managing director of MassMutual Ventures SEA, added: “We are excited to partner with Qure.ai, improving access, efficacy and efficiency in clinical care. Very few companies in this category have achieved this level of both academic and real-world validation, and Qure.ai is leading across multiple use-cases and modalities.”

Qure.ai has been incubated by Fractal, an AI and analytics firm serving Fortune 500 companies.

“Conceptualising and incubating Qure.ai has been a matter of great satisfaction and pride for us,” said Srikanth Velamakanni, co-founder of Fractal and chairman of Qure.ai. “Prashant and Pooja have assembled a brilliant team that’s committed to making healthcare accessible and affordable through AI. I am especially excited about the open research approach that Qure.ai has adopted and its focus on real world validation.”

Qure.ai taps deep learning technology to provide automated interpretation of radiology exams such as x-rays, CTs and MRI scans for time and resource-strapped medical imaging professionals.