Cent raises $15M Series A to scale AI-driven preventive scans in India

By Daniel Okafor

Preventive health startup Cent has raised $15 million in a Series A round co-led by Blume Ventures and existing investor South Park Commons. The money funds an AI-powered diagnostics platform that hunts for disease before symptoms appear.

The round mixes equity and debt. Individual investors joined too: former Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin, former OpenAI business-to-business chief technology officer Srinivas Narayanan, Sharath Narayana, Krishna Sridhar and Aprameya Radhakrishna.

Cent plans to spend the capital on research and development, stronger AI capabilities and larger clinical and engineering teams. Its target is 10 million scans by 2035. That is a thousandfold jump from today's base: the company has completed 10,000 preventive whole-body scans across Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi since inception.

Who is building Cent?

Three founders launched the company in 2025. Shashank ND previously founded Practo and OneFlow Holdings. Anshul Khandelwal was chief marketing officer at Ola Electric. Arpit Garg led product at Lenskart. The trio pairs purpose-built hardware with AI-driven radiology, diagnostics and bioinformatics.

Khandelwal frames the gap Cent attacks in plain terms. "India's healthcare system is still built to treat illness, not to find it early. We believe the next shift is preventive care that is precise and accessible at scale. Our first 10,000 scans have shown us how much that shift is needed," he said.

What does the product actually do?

Cent's flagship full-body health check, Cent Check, runs in a single visit of roughly two hours. The assessment stacks multiple technologies:

• Full-body magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan
• Low-dose computed tomography (CT)
• Bone density testing through dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA)
• Electrocardiography (ECG) and echocardiography (ECHO)
• More than 100 biomarkers

A proprietary protocol, CCNM, merges those results into one consolidated view of a member's health. Specialist doctors review the findings. Members leave with a doctor-led plan and support through the year.

The scan data carries weight. According to the company, one in four members who felt healthy on arrival had a finding that warranted action. One in 40 required immediate medical attention. The findings included early-stage tumours, narrowed arteries and aneurysms.

Why acquire a radiology workflow platform?

Cent has also bought Medsee, an AI-powered radiology reporting workflow platform. Medsee generates structured radiology reports and flags findings for review by qualified medical professionals. The goal is reporting speed and consistency as scan volumes climb.

The acquisition addresses a scaling constraint. More scanners mean nothing if reports lag behind. Structured, machine-generated drafts with human review keep the pipeline moving.

What do the investors see?

Karthik Reddy, co-founder and managing partner at Blume Ventures, cited the founders' intensity. "When we were introduced to Shashank and the team that came together to build Cent, we saw an obsessive ambition to solve for accurate diagnosis and protocols for cancers amongst other indications," he said.

Prateek Mehta, general partner at South Park Commons India, said the firm backs Cent's effort to build preventive health infrastructure that enables earlier disease detection.

The data play behind the scans

The scans feed a second business asset. Cent said the results are building a growing dataset on the health of asymptomatic Indians. The company plans to use it to develop population-specific health baselines, train models that identify disease risks earlier and support clinical research.

That dataset is the compounding mechanism. Each scan improves the models; better models sharpen early detection. If Cent reaches even a fraction of its 2035 target, it will hold the largest structured picture of healthy Indian bodies ever assembled — and the bargaining power that comes with it.