Editorial illustration for Cent Raises USD 15 Million to Expand AI-Powered Preventive Healthcare
Cent Raises $15M for AI Preventive Healthcare
Cent Raises USD 15 Million to Expand AI-Powered Preventive Healthcare
Cent, a preventive health intelligence startup founded in 2025, has raised $15 million in a Series A round co-led by Blume Ventures and South Park Commons, the companies announced on October 27. The round mixes equity and debt, with individual backers including former Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin and Srinivas Narayanan, who previously served as B2B chief technology officer at OpenAI.
The company was started by Shashank ND, who founded Practo and OneFlow Holdings, alongside Anshul Khandelwal, formerly chief marketing officer at Ola Electric, and Arpit Garg, former product head at Lenskart. Cent builds what it calls a preventive healthcare platform, pairing purpose-built hardware with AI-driven radiology, diagnostics, and bioinformatics, aimed at catching health risks before symptoms show up and tracking members over time.
Alongside the funding, Cent acquired Medsee, an AI-powered radiology reporting platform founded by Chitra Singh that drafts structured reports and flags findings for radiologists to review. The company says the money will go toward research, engineering, and building out its clinical and AI teams. Khandelwal framed the raise against a broader gap he sees in how Indian healthcare operates today.
“India's healthcare system is still built to treat illness, not to find it early. We believe the next shift is preventive care that is precise and accessible at scale. Our first 10,000 scans have shown us how much that shift is needed,” said Anshul Khandelwal, co-founder of Cent.
Why this matters
Cent's pitch sits on a familiar fault line in digital health: hardware plus AI plus a founder pedigree that signals credibility before the product has proven much. Shashank ND built Practo into a household name in Indian healthcare, and that history will carry weight with doctors and patients wary of another app promising early detection. But 10,000 scans is a pilot, not a dataset that validates clinical accuracy at population scale, and the company hasn't said what its false-positive rate looks like or how it handles liability when a scan misses something.
For founders building in regulated health spaces, Cent is a useful case study in sequencing: raise on vision and team, defer the hard regulatory and efficacy questions to Series B. For AI researchers, the interesting question isn't the $15 million, it's whether "purpose-built hardware" means proprietary sensors with real diagnostic signal or repackaged consumer devices wrapped in a model. Blume Ventures and South Park Commons are betting on the former.
We'd want to see peer-reviewed validation before anyone calls this preventive care rather than preventive marketing.
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Common Questions Answered
Who are the co-founders of Cent and what is their background in healthcare?
Cent was co-founded by Shashank ND, who previously founded Practo and OneFlow Holdings, and Anshul Khandelwal. Shashank ND's track record of building Practo into a household name in Indian healthcare brings significant credibility to the preventive health intelligence startup.
What was the funding amount raised by Cent in its Series A round and who led it?
Cent raised USD 15 million in its Series A round co-led by Blume Ventures and South Park Commons, announced on October 27. The funding round combines both equity and debt components, with notable individual backers including former Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin and Srinivas Narayanan, former B2B chief technology officer at OpenAI.
What is Cent's core vision for transforming India's healthcare system?
Cent aims to shift India's healthcare system from treating illness to finding it early through AI-powered preventive care that is precise and accessible at scale. According to co-founder Anshul Khandelwal, their first 10,000 scans have demonstrated the critical need for this preventive care approach in the Indian healthcare landscape.
What are the current limitations of Cent's clinical validation mentioned in the article?
While Cent has completed 10,000 scans, this represents a pilot program rather than a comprehensive dataset that validates clinical accuracy at population scale. The company has not yet disclosed its false-positive rates, which are crucial metrics for assessing the reliability of its AI-powered preventive healthcare technology.
Further Reading
- Papers with Code - Latest NLP Research - Papers with Code
- Hugging Face Daily Papers - Hugging Face
- ArXiv CS.CL (Computation and Language) - ArXiv
