How innovative health ventures transform rural care in India

India’s expertise in healthcare and medical research is unquestionable. From affordable treatment models and large-scale public health programmes to digital services and advanced research in critical illnesses, the country has built capabilities the world often turns to. Since independence, policy-led expansion of healthcare systems has translated into measurable gains. Neonatal, infant, under-five, and maternal mortality rates have declined steadily, while advances in hospital management, diagnostics, and critical care have improved survival and treatment outcomes across complex conditions.

Yet, delivering care to India’s 1.4 billion people is never simple. The toughest challenges emerge at the last mile, particularly in rural and underserved areas.

The difficulty is most visible in reaching patients in these areas. This is where India’s health innovation ecosystem steps in.

Across the country, start-ups are developing practical solutions for access, diagnostics, care delivery, and deep technology. They are solving problems created by scale, cost and uneven infrastructures. In doing so, they are building practical models of healthcare delivery that work for India and offer lessons for other emerging markets.

GN Focus features some of India’s pioneering health ventures whose innovations address critical concerns, set clear benchmarks in healthcare, and offer insight into how the future of care is taking shape.

What happens when the nearest doctor is hours away, diagnostics are a bus ride apart, and care only begins when illness turns urgent? For millions in rural India, this is not an abstract problem but everyday reality.

That question sits at the heart of Bhubaneswar-based CureBay’s founding story. The idea took shape during the pandemic, when the healthcare gap between urban and rural India became impossible to ignore.

“While urban India could still rely on multi-speciality hospitals and digital consultations, large parts of rural India were left without even basic primary care,” says Priyadarshi Mohapatra, Founder and CEO of CureBay, who set up the company in 2021 with co-founders Shobhan Mahapatra and Sanjay Swain.

“For many families, getting medical help meant travelling long distances, relying on informal providers, or simply waiting until the situation became critical.”

Nearly 65 per cent of India’s population lives in rural and semi-urban regions, yet healthcare delivery remains largely urban-centric. On the ground, CureBay’s founders saw how distance, lack of trust, and fragmented care journeys delayed diagnosis and worsened treatment outcomes.

“We founded CureBay with the conviction that quality primary healthcare should be accessible closer to where people live, delivered in a manner they can trust and afford,” says Mohapatra.

The team quickly realised that technology alone would not be enough. “People seek care when there is physical presence, human support, and someone to guide them through the process,” he says. Trust, especially in rural communities, remains central to healthcare decisions.

CureBay’s response is a hybrid care model. Assisted e-clinics, staffed by trained healthcare workers, serve as the first point of contact. Patients receive support with consultations, vitals, diagnostics, and follow-ups. This physical layer is backed by technology that enables teleconsultations, digital health records, AI-assisted screening, and referrals, allowing patients to access continuous primary and preventive care.

Continuity is a critical part of the model. “Earlier, patients often repeated tests, travelled multiple times for the same issue, or dropped off midway simply because there was no continuity,” says Mohapatra. CureBay’s platform brings everything into one care journey, helping doctors intervene early and avoid costly emergencies. On-ground teams guide patients through medicines and referrals, minimising confusion and delays.

The impact is already visible across the Indian states of Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand. CureBay has served over 750,000 patients across 110,000 villages and towns through more than 160 e-clinics. Earlier screening has encouraged people to seek care sooner, rather than waiting for symptoms to worsen.

Access, however, is only part of the challenge. Uncertainty around costs often discourages families from starting or continuing treatment. This led to CureBay Kavach, a subscription-based care membership. “Kavach provides access to consultations, diagnostics, medicines, and coordinated hospital support through a monthly subscription plan,” Mohapatra says. With more than 32,000 members, the model helps families plan their healthcare instead of reacting only when illness strikes.

As CureBay expands into new areas, its focus remains firmly on doing the basics right. “We believe scaling healthcare requires discipline, not short cuts,” Mohapatra says. “Our aim is to become a trusted household name in rural communities, one that families turn to early, not only in moments of crisis, for accessible, affordable, and dependable care.”

Most cancer deaths are not caused by the original tumour. They happen when cancer spreads. This process, called metastasis, has remained one of oncology’s most stubborn blind spots. Yet drug development has largely focused on stopping tumour growth, not preventing cancer from travelling to distant organs.

Bengaluru-based biotech start-up Mestastop Solutions is taking the opposite view. Its entire science is built on the belief that unless metastasis is delayed or prevented, cancer cannot be cured.

Dr Arnab Roy Chowdhury, Co-founder and Director of Mestastop Solutions, did not begin his career in oncology. His PhD and post-doctoral training were in therapeutics for infectious parasitic diseases. In 2009, during his work in oncology drug discovery at a global Contract Research Organisation (CRO), he observed a clear pattern that would shape his research.

“I realised that targeting cancer proliferation was not enough as metastasis was the biggest killer of cancer patients, and anti-proliferative treatments were not enough to stop metastasis. 40 per cent of solid tumour patients would develop metastasis subsequently, even after surgery and chemotherapy across all epithelial carcinomas,” he tells GN Focus.

Despite this reality, metastasis steadily lost priority in drug development. “Historically, there have been many clinical trial failures in stopping metastasis, and biopharma had de-prioritised metastasis research, moving on to more successful, commercially validated approaches like immunotherapy and CAR-T therapies,” Dr Roy Chowdhury says.

Mestastop went back to basics. Instead of treating metastasis as a single event, the company broke it into measurable stages, leading to its first platform, METAssay.

“We eventually ended up with 30 steps or functional phenotypic assays that would also differentiate between the behaviour of proliferating cells and metastatic cells.”

The next challenge was relevance. Lab biology had to reflect what actually happens in patients. That led to METScan, where tumour cells from 52 patients were analysed over three years.

“Of the 52 patients, 24 developed metastasis after three years,” Dr Roy Chowdhury says.

Machine learning integrated biological data with patient outcomes, revealing which steps were critical.

“METScan told us that the adaptation biology of dormant cells in the secondary micro-environment was the key to metastatic success,” he says.

This insight identified new drug targets and enabled a companion diagnostic to flag patients at higher risk.

The third platform, METVivo, improved speed and precision in drug discovery.

“The most crucial feature of METVivo is that this model uncouples proliferation from metastasis, enabling the identification of anti-metastatic compounds that do not affect proliferation.”

Today, Mestastop has three novel discovery programmes and two repurposed drugs are awaiting Phase II clinical trials. Its companion diagnostic has also shown strong predictive power.

“We have 92.3 per cent efficiency in predicting metastasis probability, with no false negatives, but we do have some false positives, which may be time-dependent.”

A Phase II trial in colorectal cancer is now planned in India, involving 144 patients.

“These patients will receive standard-of-care chemotherapy concurrently, and half will also receive the test drug in an adjuvant setting,” Dr Roy Chowdhury says.

For Mestastop, the science is only part of the challenge. Gaining acceptance for a new way of thinking about cancer remains difficult. “It is on us to travel this challenging path alone until the data is so convincing that people cannot ignore us,” he says.

The immediate focus is on delaying metastasis in high-risk patients through carefully designed clinical trials. Success there would establish proof that metastasis can be biologically controlled in a clinical setting.

“If all goes well, we will start saving lives by delaying metastasis within the next 18 months. Once we achieve that, we will pursue the more ambitious goal of preventing metastasis, which we think is possible,” Dr Roy Chowdhury says.

Many people lose their sight simply because eye problems are detected too late. Often, the signs are subtle and go unnoticed until the condition has progressed. In areas where specialists are scarce and routine screening is rare, early detection becomes even more critical.

This challenge is what led Bengaluru-based Forus Health to start its journey in 2010. The company aimed to reach people beyond traditional hospital settings, making quality eye screening accessible in communities and primary care centres.

“When Forus Health was founded in 2010, it was driven by a clear and urgent problem – preventable blindness was rising globally, while access to timely, affordable eye care remained limited for large segments of the global population,” says K. Chandrasekhar, Founder and CEO of Forus Health.

At the heart of Forus Health’s work is the 3nethra platform. The portable retinal imaging system allows high-quality screening in primary care centres, community clinics, and outreach locations. Frontline workers can capture retinal images with clinical accuracy and send them for expert review remotely.

“Traditional, ophthalmologist-led screening models were not designed to operate at population scale, particularly in areas with fewer medical tools and support. The 3nethra platform was conceived to address this gap,” Chandrasekhar says. “It was designed as a portable, easy-to-use retinal imaging system that could support large-scale preventive screening without compromising clinical accuracy. This approach allows early identification of conditions such as diabetic retinopathy, cataract, and retinopathy of prematurity, even in regions with limited access to specialists.”

Over the years, Forus Health has built a broad ecosystem combining devices, artificial intelligence, telemedicine, and digital optometry. Its AI platform FH-POISE now supports detection of multiple ocular conditions including diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, cataract, age-related macular degeneration, and retinopathy of prematurity. The platform also provides insights that can indicate systemic risks linked to cardiovascular, neurological, and autoimmune conditions.

The company’s product range has expanded from standalone retinal cameras to an integrated ecosystem that combines adult and neonatal imaging, AI-driven disease detection, tele-ophthalmology, and digital optometry solutions. Forus Health’s solutions have been deployed across 75 countries.

In India, Forus Health reaches tertiary hospitals in urban areas as well as primary care facilities and large-scale public health programmes in rural and semi-urban regions. Deployments in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, neonatal screening initiatives, and mass outreach events such as the Maha Kumbh Mela in Prayagraj last year, have enabled early diagnosis for millions.

“To date, we have supported more than 4,000 installations, touched over 22 million lives, enabled more than 700,000 remote diagnoses, and processed over 5 million images, contributing directly to earlier detection of preventable eye diseases and improved patient outcomes across urban and rural India,” Chandrasekhar says.

AI assists care teams by prioritising cases for specialist review and supporting teleconsultation platforms connecting clinics, optometrists, and ophthalmologists. This ensures advanced eye care reaches underserved populations efficiently.

As the company further expands across continents, regulatory compliance and clinical trust remain central. Approvals from US FDA, EU CE, and CDSCO, alongside global awards and public health partnerships, underline its credibility. “Our solutions are battle-tested through extensive real-world application. Our long-term public health deployments and integrated platform adoption across regions such as India, the US, Europe, Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa have helped us build consistent clinical standards, regulatory compliance, and trust across diverse healthcare systems.”

When getting a diagnosis means travelling hours to a city hospital, time is often the first thing patients lose. Delays are common, and for patients the cost is not just financial, but clinical. For millions across India, diagnostic care is concentrated in urban centres and tied to fixed laboratories and referral-heavy systems that are often hard to reach from smaller towns and rural areas.

Gurugram-based Larkai Healthcare, founded in 2020 by Pritam Dhalla and Abhilash Chakraverty, was built on the principle that diagnostics should reach the patient. Traditional approaches with expensive equipment, centralised labs, and complex workflows have long delayed care, and Larkai aims to make testing portable, technology-driven, and software-enabled.

Larkai does not view technology as a replacement for clinicians. Instead, it positions its tools as support systems for care teams working under constant pressure. “Larkai frames its tools as force multipliers, helping overstretched care teams manage more patients with greater confidence,” says Dhalla, a Stanford Seed Spark’24 graduate

At the centre of its platform are two proprietary technologies called WREN and Bluetail. WREN is a lightweight, IoT-enabled monitoring system that captures multiple physiological parameters in real time. It enables frontline healthcare workers to collect clinical-grade data even in low-resource settings, which can be securely transmitted to clinicians.

Meanwhile, Bluetail complements this with AI-led diagnostic interpretation, particularly for X-rays and ECGs. The platform analyses medical images and structured health data. It helps flag potential abnormalities and prioritise cases that need urgent attention.

Larkai’s product philosophy is shaped by the realities of small-town healthcare. “Most of India’s healthcare facilities operate under constraints very different from those of large urban hospitals. Many smaller centres lack 24/7 specialists, rely on manual vital checks, and have limited capital for high-end equipment. In this context, compact, multi-parameter devices that are easy to deploy and integrate into existing workflows can make a strong impact,” explains Dhalla.

For patients, earlier diagnosis often leads to simpler treatment pathways and it also lowers overall costs. For Larkai, this outcome remains the most important measure of success. “Healthcare access should not depend on geography. Our goal has been to design technology that works in the real conditions of India ¬ intermittent connectivity, limited staff, and tight budgets, while still meeting the expectations of clinicians and patients for quality and reliability,” he says.