DesignOCare Solutions sets sights on diagnostics side
Just before Covid-19, Dinesh Gupta Kandukuri and Kanika Bansal were working on developing a low-cost, made-in-India ventilator for the rural population through their company — DesignOCare Solutions.
Hyderabad: For two foreign-returned corporate employees, entrepreneurship came knocking at the right time and right place.
Just before the country got entangled with the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, Dinesh Gupta Kandukuri and Kanika Bansal were working on developing a low-cost, made-in-India ventilator for the rural population through their company — DesignOCare Solutions. And the pandemic bought along with it an opportunity for these two entrepreneurs to turn their vision into reality.
“Just a few weeks before the pandemic hit India, we started working on our in-house ventilators not knowing that Covid-19 would hit India so badly. Our main objective was to help the rural population and newborns in regions that cannot afford an imported ventilator. We developed our own technology and made ventilators that work in NICUs (Neonatal intensive care unit) and for preterm babies,” said Kanika, who completed her engineering from the UK and worked for a corporate in the space of designing.
The company incorporated in 2020 has not just developed ventilators but also other medical devices like band-aid-size wearable devices for babies so as to track their vital parameters and send them to the mobile phone of the parent. They have also developed another product which is a by-product of the ventilator called an HFNC machine that can be used by Covid-recovered patients post-hospitalisation. The third product is an indigenous pulse oximeter that is as accurate as European or American oximeters available in the market.
“While researching for our startup, we realised that almost 80 per cent of the medical devices in the country are imported, which, in turn, increases the cost of the device and makes it unaffordable to a large section of the population. Our ventilators can be easily installed and operated in any hospital,” says Dinesh, who worked in the US and UK for almost eight years before returning to India to start his own venture.
Currently part of WE Hub and IIT-Kanpur, the startup is tying up with third-party manufacturers to produce their devices, especially the ventilators. The development and design of the products are happening in-house and most of the parts are locally sourced, the founders said.
“Going ahead, we want to concentrate more on the diagnostics side, and we are ready to start production of our ventilators in a month. We are looking to raise funds to support our expansion plans,” says Kandukuri.
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