Carenostics, which uses AI to enable early detection and timely treatment of chronic diseases, has raised $5 million in a seed round led by New York- and Santa Monica, Calif.-based M13. Other investors in the round include San Francisco-based GreatPoint Ventures, Vermont’s Gaingels, and Humana Chairman Kurt Hillzinger, who also joined the Philadelphia-based startup’s advisory board.
Founded by the father-son duo of Bharat and Kanishka Rao, Carenostics leverages the senior’s AI healthcare experience and the junior’s startup smarts. Bharat, an alumnus of the famed Indian Institute of Technology, or IIT, earned a Ph. D in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign before spending decades heading AI healthcare practices at KPMG, Deloitte and Siemens. Kanishka, who earned a master’s degree in computer science, and bachelor’s degree in economics and entrepreneurship from the Wharton School, founded and led McKinsey’s healthtech startups practice.
Early Diagnosis Is Key
“We are setting the stage for a data-driven healthcare revolution, where every diagnostic and treatment decision is personalized using patient data and AI,” said Bharat, who serves as the CEO of Carenostics. Rao has earned more than 60 AI patents and published over 150 peer-reviewed publications, besides deploying more than 20 FDA- and EU-approved healthcare AI products in over 1,000 global health systems.
“Our goal is to stop the story of my grandfather from repeating itself, ultimately improving healthcare outcomes and reducing costs,” said Kanishka, referring to the death of his grandpa from undiagnosed chronic kidney disease.
The founders have assembled a world-class leadership team of AI pioneers that were the first to deploy AI at scale in healthcare, pointed out M13’s general partner, Latif Peracha. Carenostics has at least five leaders with Ph. Ds in AI, and experience at companies such as Siemens, McKinsey, ConcertAI, Cerner and Amazon.
“The future of healthcare is proactive, not reactive, and Carenostics’s use of clinical AI holds the transformative power to overhaul our industry by tackling the costly and life-threatening delays in diagnosis and treatment,” said Peracha.
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Huge Cost to Nation
Chronic disease is a leading cause of death and disability in the United States, costing the country about $4.1 trillion in annual healthcare, according to Carenostics. A significant part of this cost comes from undiagnosed conditions and delayed treatment, caused in the main by overburdened physicians. Carenostics says its technology significantly remedies late diagnosis and ensures early treatment. Its platform tailors AI models to each health system, based on data, and supports physicians across multiple diseases.
At Hackensack Meridian Health, New Jersey’s largest hospital system with 17 hospitals and 6 million patient records, Carenostics’ platform has helped identify up to three times more chronic kidney disease patients, and up to 20 times more severe and uncontrolled asthma patients.
Carenostics has built partnerships with AstraZeneca, the VA, and Bayer G4A, the German chemicals firm’s only early-stage investment of 2022. Its advisory board includes Dr. John Glaser, former CEO of Siemens Health Services; Aneesh Chopra, former chief technology officer of the United States; and Prof. Srini Devadas, former associate department chair of Computer Science at MIT.
