Cent, the preventive health startup co-founded by Practo founder Shashank ND, has raised $15 million in a Series A co-led by Blume Ventures and existing investor South Park Commons. The round, disclosed on 27 October, mixes equity and debt, and arrives with an acquisition: Medsee, an AI radiology reporting platform.
The Bengaluru company was founded in 2025 by three operators with unusually specific resumes. Shashank ND built Practo into India’s best known doctor discovery platform and now chairs it, Anshul Khandelwal was chief marketing officer at Ola Electric, and Arpit Garg ran product at Lenskart.
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What The Cent Check Actually Screens
Cent sells one product. A single visit, the Cent Check, combines a full-body MRI, a CT calcium score for the heart, a DEXA bone scan, a chest X-ray and a broad blood panel, with genetics layered on top. Cent says the bundle reads more than 100 biomarkers and screens for over 300 conditions, then tracks each customer for 365 days through an app that reduces the data to one health score.
Its own disclosures carry the pitch. Cent says it has completed more than 10,000 scans, found significant health issues in over 2,500 people, and identified nearly 350 with potentially life-threatening conditions that many of them did not know about. It has set a target of helping save one million lives by 2035.
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Why Blume And South Park Commons Signed
Karthik Reddy, co-founder and managing partner at Blume Ventures, said the firm saw an obsessive ambition to solve for accurate diagnosis and protocols, especially in cancers. Prateek Mehta, general partner at South Park Commons India, came back after the seed round and said that with every scan, Cent has shown early detection changes lives. The cap table also carries Arun Sarin, former Vodafone chief executive, and Srinivas Narayanan, formerly OpenAI’s CTO for business products.
Medsee answers a practical problem. Founded by Chitra Singh, it builds software that drafts structured radiology reports and flags findings for a radiologist to review instead of replacing the doctor. For Cent, which must read thousands of images as it adds centres, faster and more consistent reporting decides whether scans become a queue or a service. The purchase price was not disclosed.
The Arithmetic Behind A $15 Million Cheque
Whole-body imaging is a fixed cost business. An MRI installation needs a shielded room, a scanner, a radiographer and a reporting radiologist before it earns anything, which is why the round blends equity with debt. Cent raised $5 million in seed funding in March 2026, so disclosed capital now stands near $20 million.
The company says the money funds research and development, the platform itself, and hiring across AI, engineering and clinical teams. That order matters for a diagnostic product: the software has to get better at reading the same scan, and the clinical bench has to grow at least as fast as the number of centres.
Risks And Open Questions
Cent has not disclosed a valuation, its revenue, or the price of a single check, so the round cannot yet be tested against any multiple. Whole-body MRI screening also carries a debate of its own, because more imaging finds more incidental findings, and each one generates follow-up tests, anxiety and cost. How Cent handles false positives decides whether 2,500 findings read as lives saved or as expensive maybes.
Competition is well funded. Diagnostics chains sell preventive packages at a fraction of the price, hospitals fold executive health checks into their own imaging networks, and other startups chase the same affluent, asymptomatic customer. Cent’s answer is depth rather than reach, so the next two years test how many people will pay for certainty.
What To Watch
The signals to track are unglamorous. Cent runs a flagship centre in Bengaluru opened in April 2026 and a Gurugram clinic added in June, and the pace of a third and a fourth will say more about unit economics than any announcement. Its corporate arm, which sells checks to employers, is the cheapest route to volume.
The editorial view: Cent is the most credible attempt yet at turning preventive imaging into a consumer product in India, and founder pedigree explains this round more than any figure in the deck. The risk is a premium clinic chain for the top few percent of earners while the disease burden it describes sits in households that will never see a full-body MRI. Saving a million lives by 2035 needs a cheaper second product, and none has been announced.
