Neonatal care firm Child Health Imprints secures $3.26m funding

They plan to expand their manufacturing base in South Korea.

Child Health Imprints (CHIL), a Singapore-based neonatal-clinical care improvement firm, has raised $3.26m (US$2.3m) in Pre-Series A funding led by HealthXCapital, with participation from Enterprise SG and other HNIs.

CHIL aims to improve clinical outcomes in Neonatal ICUs using IoT system and digitization. The company develops and applies informational and computational technologies including IoT, artificial intelligence (AI), and predictive analysis to improve the early diagnosis of critical diseases and overall quality of neonatal intensive care units across the world.

The start-up plans to use the funds to collaborate with experts from two universities in the US, and improve their decision support offering.

Presently, CHIL is running in 25 NICUs across hospitals in India including Apollo Hospitals in four cities as well as Sir Gangaram Hospital in New Delhi. The startup also shared plans to further expansion in India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Gulf Cooperation Council and the ASEAN region shortly. Chief amongst these is a planned expansion of its manufacturing base in Daejeon, South Korea, as well as its software and data analytics team in India.

CHIL founders Harpreet Singh and Ravneet Kaur built their startup after one of their twins passed away within a week of birth due to NEC (necrotizing enterocolitis). This reportedly led them to develop a bedside IoT based device called NEO, which aggregates data in a vendor-agnostic manner offering temporal (longitudinal) data of the infant’s stay in the NICU that reduces manual charting effort of nurses. It is supported by the AI-based analytics engine iNICU, which in turn assists the neonatologists in focussing on neonatal care and identifying early onset of diseases.

“Our aim is to improve neonatal safety across countries with high neonatal mortality rate. The company will also develop inroads into more advanced neonatal ecosystems to bring their best clinical practices to other markets across the world,” Singh, CEO of CHIL, said in the release.