Daybreak - Why the man who built Practo to find doctors is now using AI to find disease first

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

India's life expectancy has doubled since 1950. But 65% of deaths are still from diseases caught too late. Cent, the new startup from Practo's founder, thinks it has an answer: full-body AI scans that find risks before they become diagnoses. At Rs 20,000–30,000 a scan, it's already found critical findings in hundreds of patients — with zero false positives, it claims.But Cent doesn't diagnose. It doesn't refer. And it has no proprietary technology. So what exactly are you paying for — and what happens after it finds something?Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Did you know that when cancer is caught in stage 1, survival rates sit above 90%? And if you catch it in stage 4, did you know that that rate drops below 20%? Now, if you're wondering if this is a health PSA on daybreak, then it's not. This is actually an opening act of an ad for cent. It's a preventive health startup that launched about a year ago. And this factoid is not the only thing that the ad goes on about. It also shows a painful story about a loved one who passed away after a late diagnosis. And it's one of many.

Another ad from Sent goes into the drawbacks of full-body CT scans, which the company explains prioritizes speed over accuracy. But not Sent. No, Sent is different. It has built a health intelligence stack around the more comprehensive MRI scan. This is how the startup kicked off a year ago, while spreading its gospel to the people. You see, scent comes from an interesting pedigree.

It's founded by Shashang Gendi, who was also the person who founded Tracto. But the two companies couldn't be more different. Tracto, which is now almost 20 years old, has grown from a doctor discovery platform into something closer to a health e-commerce, covering everything from appointment bookings to medicine delivery. It raised nearly $2.30 million

and only just turn Ibidda positive. Sent, by contrast, plays much further upstream, way before a company like Prakto even enters the picture. The question it's answering is much simpler. How do you read people before they become patients? My colleague, the Ken reporter Sudezhena Ray, spoke to Anshul Khandelwal, who is one of the co-founders for Send. He told her that Sen's ideal consumer is anyone above the age of 35

who's starting to think about their health. And turns out, scent isn't alone in this space. Its closest rival, Nura, offers 120-minute full-body scans using proprietary Fuji film imaging technology to both B2C and B2B customers. Others like Nira Mai and Kure AI are both B2B players that sell to hospitals. Niramai pioneered a non-invasive combination of thermal imaging and AI to screen Indian women for breast cancer,

while Cure AI uses artificial intelligence to scan medical images such as x-rays and CT scans for abnormalities. In comparison to these players, Sense's proposition is actually more modest. It layers a homegrown AI orchestration stack on top of pre-existing Siemens hardware and off-the-shelf scan software modules for MRI, CT and Dexas scans. What that means is that scent neither diagnosis diseases nor refers you to medical professionals who can. Khandelwal told Sudezhana that Sends work stops at identifying risks and ordering them according to priority, after which you have to take a call on what needs to be done. So for patients who get a full body screening and report from scent, what comes next?

Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Richard Voguees, and every day of the week, my co-host, Nika Sharma and I will bring you one news story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today's Friday, the 17th of April. SENT isn't cheap. A full-body AI assessment costs $20,000 to $30,000. Considering this is more or less the same as India's median monthly income, it's safe to say that the test is not meant for a large part of the population. But surprisingly enough, Khandelwar told Sudezna that Senn's early cohort of customers

had actually included a large number of middle-class people who have started thinking about health and mortality in some way or the other. And that makes sense considering the broader pattern. India's life expectancy has risen from 41 years in 1950 to 72 today. But non-communicable diseases still cost 65% of deaths in the country and most are caught too late. So it's something of a paradox. People are living longer, but they're not necessarily healthier. That's where startups like Sent come in.

Over its first year, Cent has carried out about 50,000. 100 scans and claims an 83% early detection index. Arpitkark, who is the third co-founder, adds that among the 3% of people with critical findings, the company has not found a single false positive case. But what's less advertised is that Sends entire existence kind of hinges on a loophole. See, in January, India reclassified AI diagnostic software as Class C medical devices, requiring clinical validation on Indian patients before use. Send sidesteps this by arguing that its AI does not diagnose.

It only aggregates and structures findings from pre-existing tests. Which raises an obvious question. Why go to send when any hospital can run the same scans and give you a concrete diagnosis? Gurg's answer was this. Sent cut scan time from 2 hours to 30 to 50 minutes and increases machine utilization, which brings costs down by 50 to 70 percent. That's kind of ironic, given that their ad was criticising the existing system's bias for speed over accuracy. There is, however, one real advantage sent has over private hospitals, and it has everything to do with incentives.

More on this in the next segment. Private hospitals that offer preventive screenings have a structural problem. They also do the surgeries. That means hospitals like Max, Apollo, Manipal, Fortez, Narayana and others, are all financially incentivized to find something wrong with you. Sent removes that conflict of interest. It detects, it doesn't read and it does not refer. This is how the company goes about it.

After a full-body risk stratification, customers get a 30 to 45-minute consultation with a doctor who walks them through critical, major, minor and normal findings. But the doctor won't tell you where to go next or what to do. Kandilwal believes that if they have anything to do with them, post-scan procedures, patients will lose trust. Meanwhile, other healthcare systems have found ways to manage this. In the UK, National Health Service General Practitioners are salaried. They earn the same whether you need a scan or a surgery. In the US, Caesa Permanente, a healthcare company has the

insurer cover both screening and treatment which reduces the incentive for unnecessary procedures. The Indian healthcare system in comparison kind of needs to do better because you see, there is a real gap. Patients with critical findings will naturally see a specialist. But what happens to the people with minor deficiencies? You know, nothing urgent but something to watch out for. Two things tend to happen then. Either they do nothing and risk a small problem becoming a bigger one, or they go to a private hospital which may on purpose misread the report to justify additional tests and procedures. In fact, hospitals often won't even accept reports from external centres and ask patients to redo everything in-house.

Now, there is a middle path, which is a general practitioner who understands lifestyle interventions, who can say stuff like exercise more, sleep better, cut the salt before all of these become a chronic condition. But that option barely exists in India. As one Bangal-based health specialist put it, detection is a technological event, but prevention is a behavioral challenge. and no one's really working on the second part. Stay tuned. Practo is actually an accurate point of contrast.

Referrals were always the heart and soul of its business model. For instance, in 2022, the company launched Practo care surgeries, an end-to-end service for surgical procedures from initial consultation to post-op care. It earns commissions from the labs and hospitals it refers patients to, with margins of around 25 to 30% per transaction. Now, sense model is deliberately cleaner than that. Kandilwal told us that it does not do referrals, plus it also offers free follow-up scans at six months letting customers track changes in specific metrics over time.

That sounds great. But there's a limit to how much scent can actually do. Kandilwal admitted that the company does not have the authority to question why a consumer went to a particular doctor or why that doctor prescribed a particular procedure. sense sits outside the system by design, and that means it has limited visibility into what happens after. Plus, sense data isn't exactly comprehensive either. The founders acknowledge that 1,500 scans is a negligible sample size. The company needs more data, after which they intend to publish an impact report about if and how their role as a detection layer works,

and that if in their roadmap is definitely doing a lot of heavy lifting. And see, here's a deeper issue. Even though scent comes from India's first health tech stable praetor, it has not built any proprietary diagnostic algorithm unlike Kior or Niramaai. So its rhetoric seems a little misplaced. Now, MRIs may be better than CET scans, as SENS ad proclaims, but that's nothing exclusive to the company. Several other diagnostic companies are also offering full-body scans,

which means it will be a while before the newest screening brand on the block proves its metal. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription offers daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts.

To subscribe, head to the Ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague, Rachel Vargis, and edited by Rajaj. chiefsient.