Bengaluru-based healthtech startup Cent has raised $5 million in seed funding from OneFlow Holdings and venture firm South Park Commons to strengthen its artificial intelligence-driven early disease detection platform in India. The funding will support the startup’s efforts to expand its technology capabilities, healthcare partnerships, and screening infrastructure.
Cent was founded by Practo co-founder Shashank ND along with Arpit Garg, formerly associated with Lenskart, and Anshul Khandelwal, who previously worked with Ola Electric. The startup focuses on identifying early-stage risks related to major health conditions including cancer, cardiac, neurological, and metabolic diseases.
Operating on a direct-to-consumer model, the Bengaluru-based company provides specialised scans aimed at detecting diseases before symptoms become visible. The platform is designed to enable individuals to identify health risks earlier and seek timely medical intervention.
Cent combines advanced imaging technologies with artificial intelligence and more than 120 biomarkers to analyse potential health risks. Through this approach, the platform is able to screen for over 300 possible health conditions during a single visit.
A key component of its approach is the company’s proprietary CCNM protocol, which stands for Cardiac, Cancer, Neurological, and Metabolic. The protocol integrates multiple diagnostic technologies including whole-body MRI, low-dose CT scans, DEXA scans, ECG testing, and blood and urine biomarkers to generate detailed organ-level risk assessments.
“India has built world-class treatment capability, but our healthcare system is still oriented around diseases that have already declared themselves. In the preventive space, we need dedicated infrastructure, the right technology, the right protocols, the right capital, built specifically for detection. That is the gap Cent is designed to close,” said Shashank ND, founder and chair, Cent.
Arpit Garg, co-founder and chief AI and research officer at Cent, highlighted how technological advancements have made such integrated screening possible. “Five years ago, this level of integrated screening was not technically feasible. The convergence of advanced MRI, AI-assisted radiology, and multi-omics analysis now allows us to screen for 300+ conditions in a single visit and a faster scan time,” he said.
The startup began operations in the first quarter of FY26 and has already conducted more than 1,500 scans. According to the company, approximately 26 per cent of these scans revealed clinically meaningful findings, while around 3–4 per cent identified critical conditions that required immediate medical attention, often among individuals who had not yet shown any symptoms.
Anshul Khandelwal, co-founder and chief business officer at Cent, emphasised the importance of an efficient operating model in preventive healthcare. “The bottleneck in early detection has never been intent; it has been the operating model. If you depend on symptom-led referrals and multi-purpose centres, you can’t scale rigour. By designing around one protocol and one workflow, we can drive utilisation, consistency and cost discipline,” he said.
Following the funding round, Cent is expanding its engineering capabilities and strengthening collaborations within the healthcare ecosystem. The company plans to establish specialised early detection centres, starting with facilities in Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Delhi, before expanding into additional cities such as Pune and Hyderabad.
Looking ahead, Cent aims to scale its preventive healthcare model significantly. The startup has set a long-term goal of enabling 10 million scans and contributing to saving one million lives by 2035 by making early disease detection a routine component of healthcare in India.
