Ayati DevicesThe Story
Ayati Devices, a Bengaluru-based medical-technology startup, has raised ₹15 crore ($1.5 million) in a pre-Series A funding round led by Inflexor Ventures. The round was announced on 11 August 2026. The company said it will use the capital to accelerate commercialisation, expand in domestic and international markets, strengthen manufacturing, and increase investment in research and artificial intelligence. Ayati Devices has not disclosed the valuation at which the round was raised, the equity given up, or the other investors that may have participated alongside Inflexor. Founded in 2019 by Nishant Kathpal and incubated at IIT Bombay's Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Ayati Devices makes portable, point-of-care diagnostic devices for diabetic foot complications and peripheral vascular disease. Its earlier funding came largely through grants and small cheques, including a Biotechnology Ignition Grant from the government's BIRAC, and the company appeared on Shark Tank India in early 2025; this pre-Series A is its first sizeable institutional round. Ayati's portfolio spans several stages of diabetic-foot assessment. Vibrasense measures the vibration perception threshold to detect large-fibre peripheral neuropathy, and Vibrasense+T adds warm and cold perception testing; Vasosense screens for peripheral artery disease, and Angiocam images tissue perfusion in real time. The company also sells the PODIA Trolley on a pay-per-test basis, lowering the upfront cost for providers. Ayati says its devices have been deployed in more than 30 countries, with over 10,000 units in the field and more than 1 million screenings enabled, figures the company reports and that have not been independently verified. Its flagship Vibrasense has been through a clinical evaluation involving 562 people with type 2 diabetes.
Why It Matters
Ayati is built on a large, under-screened problem. Diabetic peripheral neuropathy and foot complications lead to ulcers and, untreated, to amputations, yet the standard screening tools are either crude, like the tuning fork, or expensive and confined to tertiary hospitals, like biothesiometry and nerve-conduction studies. India carries a heavy diabetes burden and a shortage of specialists, so most at-risk patients are never screened until damage is done. Ayati's wedge is to make that first-level screening portable, affordable and usable by a general clinician or a technician in a camp rather than a neurologist. The company earns by selling devices and, increasingly, by lowering the barrier to buying them. Its core products are handheld screeners, but the more interesting commercial move is the PODIA Trolley's pay-per-test model, which turns a capital purchase into a per-use cost for a clinic. That aligns Ayati's revenue with actual screening volume and makes adoption easier for smaller providers, at the cost of a slower, usage-dependent revenue build rather than an upfront device sale. What the round does not tell us is how large that revenue is. Ayati has raised only modestly before this, its reported traction, 30 countries, 10,000 devices, a million screenings, is measured in deployments rather than rupees, and it has not disclosed sales, recurring revenue or margins. A medical-device company also carries costs a software startup does not: regulatory clearances in each market, clinical validation, manufacturing and after-sales support. The clinical study behind Vibrasense matters here, because in diagnostics, adoption follows evidence, and evidence is slow and expensive to generate.
The Strategic Read
The market assumption behind this round is that early screening for diabetic complications can be pushed out of tertiary hospitals and into clinics, camps and primary care, and that a company owning affordable, validated devices for that shift can build a durable position as the volume of screening grows. It is a credible public-health thesis, and one Inflexor is betting has both a commercial and an impact return. Where Ayati's defensibility could come from is the combination the round is meant to deepen: a portfolio that spans neuropathy, blood flow, microcirculation and plantar pressure, clinical evidence behind the flagship device, and regulatory clearances in the markets it enters. In diagnostics, those approvals and studies are slow to earn and therefore hard for a new entrant to leapfrog, which is the closest thing to a moat a device company gets. The pay-per-test model adds a second layer, because once a clinic runs its screening workflow on Ayati's trolley, switching means retraining and re-procuring. The risks are the ones every medical-device scale-up faces. Selling into 30 countries sounds like reach, but each market has its own regulatory pathway, distribution and reimbursement dynamics, and thin spread across many geographies can be weaker than depth in a few. Manufacturing hardware at volume ties up capital that software businesses avoid, and ₹15 crore is a modest sum against an ambition that includes international expansion, manufacturing and AI investment at once. Larger diagnostics companies and cheaper commodity screeners sit on either side of Ayati's price point. The honest read is that this is an early, mission-aligned round for a company with real clinical grounding and unproven economics. The traction is measured in devices shipped and screenings run, not in disclosed revenue or retention, and the pay-per-test model's promise depends on utilisation the company has not published. Whether Ayati converts a strong clinical story and a wide deployment footprint into a scalable business is what the next, larger round will have to demonstrate.
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