Andrew Ng’s AI Fund has announced its first investment in India, backing Gurugram-based AI healthcare startup Jivi. The AI-focused venture capital fund, known for its investments in tech-driven startups, has chosen Jivi as its entry point into India’s rapidly growing AI market.
Jivi, an AI-powered platform, assists healthcare providers by suggesting potential diagnoses, generating health reports, and performing various administrative tasks, according to the fund’s statement.
While the exact amount invested in the startup or the stake purchased was not disclosed, the move underscores AI Fund’s commitment to expanding its portfolio in the healthcare domain.
Ankur Jain, the former chief product officer of BharatPe, left the fintech giant last year to pursue ventures in AI and healthcare. Alongside G V Sanjay Reddy, chairman of Reddy Ventures, he co-founded Jivi.ai, marking Jain’s second entrepreneurial endeavor.
With a strong background in AI and machine learning, Jain founded Jivi in January 2024. Just months after its inception, the startup announced its first model, Jivi MedX, which outperformed popular models like Google’s Med-PaLM 2 and OpenAI’s GPT-4 on the Open Medical LLM Leaderboard.
In an exclusive interaction with AIM, Jain revealed that the company plans to launch a series of models focussed on healthcare in the coming months.
“While Jivi MedX is a text model, we are working on a series of other models that we internally call a model cluster. For example, there could be a different model that specialises in diabetes, and for ophthalmology, there will be a different model.
“The next model from Jivi will be a vision model. We are working on a multimodal MedX,” Jain said.
The vision Jain has with his new startup is to build an AI medical companion that the eight billion-strong population in the world can use for free. AI is finding use cases in other domains of healthcare such as drug discovery and genoming.
India’s artificial intelligence sector is projected to more than double by 2027, reaching up to $22 billion, according to a Nasscom-BCG report. The report highlighted that the products and startups category, which Jivi is a part of, is expected to account for up to 17% of the total AI market, alongside financial services.
AI Fund, which has previously invested in companies such as podcast-production platform Podcastle and investment-research application Octagon AI, is backed by prominent investors including Sequoia Capital and Softbank Group.
Ng, a computer scientist and the managing general partner at AI Fund, has an extensive background in AI development, having led projects at Alphabet’s Google and Baidu. Earlier this year, he also joined the board of Amazon.
The healthcare sector in India has increasingly turned to AI to enhance medical diagnostics, streamline administrative processes, and optimise patient care. Jivi’s use of AI reflects these trends, providing healthcare providers with technology-driven solutions for more accurate diagnoses and more efficient workflows.
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