Building a Global AI Venture for Medical Imaging Analysis from India: Prashant Warier, CEO of Qure.ai (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When you validated the TB use case in 2018, did you put that as your only use case? Were you doing other radiology use cases as well?

Prashant Warier: We had a lot of other use cases. We are also working on a head CT product. Chest X-rays has a high volume. The other one requires speed. AI can manage volume and speed. Head CTs are taken when you’re looking at critical cases. When you want to do something quickly, you do a CT. You need a fast interpretation there. For a stroke patient, for every minute that goes by, brain cells are dying. You want to intervene quickly.

Building a Global AI Venture for Medical Imaging Analysis from India: Prashant Warier, CEO of Qure.ai (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How did you find this customer?

Prashant Warier: TB is not one of those things that you can identify on an X-ray. If there is TB, it is likely that the X-ray will show some abnormality, but not every abnormality is likely to be TB. It could be other kinds of disease. Even COVID might look somewhat similar. It’s not precise. The patient comes in and takes an X-ray. If the X-ray is positive, you can do a microbiological test. That is a confirmation.

Building a Global AI Venture for Medical Imaging Analysis from India: Prashant Warier, CEO of Qure.ai (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to build a product based on this data?

Prashant Warier: We started in 2016 — a lot of the data acquisition happened by mid-2017. In the first year of Qure, I was on the road working on getting more data. As a data scientist, I knew that data was key. You see algorithms built on a hundred images that don’t work. We spent time getting access to a lot of data. 2017 was when we started building our core products.

Building a Global AI Venture for Medical Imaging Analysis from India: Prashant Warier, CEO of Qure.ai (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What happened to the company?

Prashant Warier: I got an exit in 2015. Somebody wanted to acquire the technology and use that for customer targeting for email engines.

Sramana Mitra: Was that bootstrapped?

Prashant Warier: Yes.

Building a Global AI Venture for Medical Imaging Analysis from India: Prashant Warier, CEO of Qure.ai (Part 1)

Prashant has built a wonderful Healthcare AI company with 1600 customers worldwide. This is extremely sophisticated navigation. Please read on to learn the nuances.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Bootstrapping an AI Chatbot Startup with a Paycheck: Ankush Sabharwal, CEO of CoRover (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Your friend gave you some money and gave the money back. What other financing has happened?

Ankush Sabharwal: My two friends who joined as co-founders gave me money. We took angel funding just before IRCTC went live. Then we got funds from Canbank VC. Now we will be announcing a fund raise.

Sramana Mitra: What is the total amount of funding so far?

Bootstrapping an AI Chatbot Startup with a Paycheck: Ankush Sabharwal, CEO of CoRover (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How much money did you make this way – from advertising?

Ankush Sabharwal: It’s more money than we would have made through subscription.

Sramana Mitra: Really?

Ankush Sabharwal: There are four million users on the website and more in the app every day.

Sramana Mitra: Traffic volume was very large. You just created a way to monetize that traffic for both of you.

Bootstrapping an AI Chatbot Startup with a Paycheck: Ankush Sabharwal, CEO of CoRover (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You were working at Ultisource when you negotiated with Indian Railways?

Ankush Sabharwal: Yes. In the appraisal cycle when I was about to quit the company, I got the highest rating. I was Group Manager that time. When you’re the manager’s manager, you hardly get the highest rating in appraisals.