Ayati Devices Raises ₹15 Crore to Scale Its Made-in-India Diabetic-Foot Screening Tech

Diabetic peripheral neuropathy — the slow loss of sensation in the feet that can end in ulcers and amputation — is one of the most common and most preventable complications of diabetes. The catch is that it is badly under-screened, because the gold-standard nerve tests are expensive, bulky and confined to specialist labs. A Bengaluru medtech startup has spent years building cheaper, portable alternatives, and has now raised its first institutional cheque to take them wider.

Ayati Devices has raised ₹15 crore (about $1.5 million) in a Pre-Series A round led by Inflexor Ventures. It is the company's first institutional funding, and it plans to use the money to accelerate commercialisation, expand in domestic and international markets, strengthen manufacturing and deepen its investments in research and artificial intelligence.

The devices

Ayati's flagship product, Vibrasense, is a portable, hand-held device that measures the vibration perception threshold — a proxy for large-fibre nerve function — to flag patients at risk of peripheral neuropathy. It is battery-powered, can screen scores of patients on a single charge, and is built to be used by a general clinician rather than a neurologist in a wired-up lab. A variant, Vibrasense+T, adds warm and cold perception testing to catch small-fibre involvement that vibration testing alone can miss.

The company has broadened well beyond a single instrument. Its current platform brings together assessments across neuropathy, blood flow, microcirculation and plantar pressure — the cluster of measurements that together build a picture of diabetic-foot risk, rather than one narrow reading. That systems approach is what lets a primary-care setting, not just a tertiary hospital, run a meaningful foot check.

The traction behind the raise

Ayati was founded in 2019 by Nishant Kathpal and incubated at IIT Bombay's Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE). Its diagnostic accuracy has been examined in peer-reviewed work benchmarking Vibrasense against a biothesiometer and nerve-conduction studies, and its devices carry Indian regulatory (CDSCO) approval.

The commercial footprint is unusual for a company only now taking its first institutional round: Ayati says its technology has been deployed across roughly 30 countries, with more than 10,000 devices in the field and, per the company, over a million screenings enabled to date. That combination — proven deployments abroad and a large under-served market at home — is what an early-stage investor like Inflexor is buying into.

Why it matters

India carries one of the world's largest diabetic populations, and foot complications are a leading, and disproportionately costly, cause of hospitalisation and disability among them. Most of that burden is avoidable if neuropathy is caught early, but early detection has been gated behind equipment and expertise that most clinics do not have. Affordable, portable, made-in-India screening tools push that check towards the point of care — smaller hospitals, diabetes clinics, even camps — where the patients actually are.

For Ayati, the ₹15 crore is less a proof-of-concept round than fuel for scale: more manufacturing, more markets, and an AI layer to sharpen how its readings translate into risk. The clinical need is not in doubt; the question the funding sets up is how fast a device-plus-software platform built at IIT Bombay can convert global interest into installed base.

Sources

• Entrackr — Ayati Devices raises Rs 15 Cr led by Inflexor Ventures in pre-Series A
• Indian Startup News — MedTech startup Ayati Devices raises Rs 15 crore to expand diagnostic platform
• StartupTalky — Ayati Devices Raises INR 15 Crore to Scale AI-Driven Diabetic Foot Diagnostics
• Ayati Devices — Vibrasense product page
• BioSpectrum India — Ayati Devices introduces diabetic neuropathy screener VIBRASENSE