This Bengaluru-based firm is quietly saving thousands of mothers and newborns—here's how
For Arun Agarwal, who was born in Alwar, the reports of stillborn babies and maternal deaths were familiar occurrences. For years, he has heard these heartbreaking stories. However, his perspective changed when he learnt more about the high maternal and infant mortality rates in developing countries during his time at Vellore Institute of Technology, prompting him to seek a solution.
According to the Rural Health Statistics report for 2022-23, there is a severe shortage of gynaecologists in rural India. The report highlights that against a requirement of 5,491, there are only 1,442 gynaecologists available, resulting in a shortfall of 74.2%.
After graduation, Agarwal pursued a biomedical engineering course and visited several hospitals and labour wards across the country for his research.
In 2015, Agarwal joined the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC), which was looking for entrepreneurs working in maternity and child healthcare. A year later, the idea for Janitri Innovations germinated. Janitri is focused on providing affordable and accessible maternal and neonatal healthcare. Today, it has a wide range of products for both hospitals and at-home services for mothers.
Its flagship product, Keyar, which initially started as an affordable and portable foetal monitoring device, today has different variants, such as a beltless ECG/EMG-based foetal maternal labour monitoring patch, postpartum haemorrhage risk detection, a wireless & portable smart CTG machine, a smart newborn jaundice monitor, a handheld foetal monitor and a home NST (Non-Stress Test) for high-risk mothers. Janitri has been granted seven patents; it has also filed 19 patents. The company has monitored over 200,000 mothers, catered to more than 800 hospitals and saved 8,000 lives operating in more than 11 countries.
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Janitri Innovations was also the winner of India's Top MSME of the Year- Micro, at the ET MSME Awards 2024.
Janitri Innovations was also the winner of India's Top MSME of the Year- Micro, at the ET MSME Awards 2024.
Maternity miracle
Like many innovative start-ups, Janitri had its own share of a long gestation period. It started pilots in 2016 and launched the product commercially in 2021 after getting regulatory approvals.
'It's been four years since the commercialisation of our products. We have added so many other products and use cases, including post-delivery and newborn monitoring, since then. We were a team of 15 people in 2019 when we had to go through the ISO regulatory approvals. Now, we have grown into a team of 70 people,' Agarwal says.
Janitri's other flagship product, Keyar Echo, is a first-of-its-kind home pregnancy monitoring device that allows expectant mothers to monitor their baby's heartbeat and well-being from home, ensuring timely medical decisions. Keyar's other variants, Keyar DT Max and Keyar DT Max Plus, enable advanced and smart pregnancy monitoring and immediate postpartum monitoring for timely intervention. It allows remote monitoring with data access on mobile apps for the doctors so timely action can be taken. Janitri has also enhanced hospital efficiency through Navam software, which digitises labour monitoring with AI-driven alerts and partograph generation, ensuring better clinical outcomes. These innovations are backed by patented technologies, extensive clinical validation and a user-centric approach addressing gaps in both hospital-based and home-based care.
Janitri's Daksh SI Max is a smart obstetric shock index monitor, which is a portable medical-grade wireless device that helps doctors predict postpartum haemorrhage risk.
Bengaluru-based Latha Venkatram, a senior obstetrician- gynaecologist, who has been with Janitri since its inception, explained that back then they had been looking for a low-cost, effective foetal monitoring device using electrical impulses, and this is where Janitri's innovation came to the rescue. 'There was only one other such product, which was expensive, but Janitri was a made-in-India device, affordable and fantastic. The partographs produced are better with this; we have compared it with a traditional Huntley Partograph monitor, and the graph is satisfactory. The other important feature is the maternal heart rate is also recorded. So twin monitors are also available now, so the foetal surveillance is quite effective, easy and fairly cost-effective,' she says.
The company was also a part of Shark Tank India Season 2 in 2023. Agarwal went with Namita Thapar, Executive Director of Emcure Pharmaceuticals, for an offer of Rs 1 crore for 2.5% equity.
Talking about Janitri's success overseas, Agarwal explains that they see similar maternal healthcare issues in the Global South.
'The field of pregnancy and newborn care faces issues in other developing countries like Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America. So, we get a lot of queries from those countries from doctors, hospital distributors and other stakeholders. We have deployed the product in Kenya, South Africa, Malaysia, Brazil, among other countries,' he says, adding that now the company is not very aggressive for the international market and will become so after getting international approvals from the FDA and CE.
Agarwal highlighted that different variants of their products make it affordable to all—starting from Rs 40,000 to over Rs 2 lakh for a premium version. In hospitals, the devices start at Rs 1 lakh each.
What next? The company is now focusing on building products and features for the entire journey of pregnancy, labour and newborns up to 2 years old. 'Our whole focus is purely from the perspective of some kind of vital monitoring and AI-based early-decision-making algorithms which can give support or early alerts to the healthcare worker or mother at home,' he says.
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