Inspired by a tragedy Dr. Junaid Shaik built a device that radically lowers the cost of tests on blood smears. Livo.AI is now translating its experience in India to the US. Shout out to listener Sudhir Manda, MD for connecting me with this compelling founder and startup.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces Dr. Junaid Shaik
What Livo.ai is Solving
"... We are basically digitizing these samples, whichever goes into a microscope so that a pathologist can basically see these tests or see these cells or samples in very high resolution from elsewhere, sitting elsewhere..."
"... That's where Livo comes in. You directly jump right into the report, and the second problem is you don't have to in the first place travel there..."
What Makes This Device So Affordable?
How Livo.ai Will Bring in Revenue
Dr. Junaid's Background
“...I understand that what pushed you to start Livo.ai is that you had a tragic experience in medical school…”
ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:
Transcript of “Livo.AI”
Guest: Junaid Shaik
Sal Daher: I'm really proud to say that the Angel Invest Boston Podcast is sponsored by Purdue University entrepreneurship and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson. Purdue is exceptional in its support of its faculty, faculty of its top five engineering school in helping them get their technology from the lab out to the market, out to industry, out to the clinic.
Peter Fasse is also a great support to entrepreneurs. He is a patent attorney specializing in microfluidics and has been tremendously helpful to some of the startups with which I'm involved, including a startup came out of Purdue, Savran Technologies. I'm proud to have these two sponsors for my podcast.
[music]
Sal Daher Introduces Dr. Junaid Shaik
Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting founders and angels. Today we are speaking with Dr. Junaid Shaik from India, who has founded a company in India that he is bringing to the US and he's doing something very interesting. He was introduced to me by a very good friend of the podcast, a listener, Dr. Sudhir Manda in the US. Shout out to Dr. Sudhir Manda. Thanks for connecting us. Welcome Junaid.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Great to be here, Sal. Thanks for having me.
Sal Daher: Awesome. Your company, Livo.ai, what problem is it solving?
What Livo.ai is Solving
Dr. Junaid Shaik: When you look at a lab, pathology lab or a hospital lab, it has two types of tests. Every lab does operate two types of tests, one is machine-dependent test and the other is expert-dependent test where there is microscopy involved or you can just call it microscopy-dependent test. You might see that for some tests, the turnaround time, the reporting time is pretty fast, but for some others, especially wherever there is abnormality involved, the turnaround time is either in days, most probably in weeks. That's because there is microscopic examination involved.
Sal Daher: A machine-based test would be like a metabolic panel or something like that, that can be done with high throughput device comes back within hours, and they're doing thousands and thousands of these every day?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes.
Sal Daher: Metabolic panel something how might--
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Vitamin D you have.
Sal Daher: Sodium?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes, sodium you have, so on and so forth.
Sal Daher: On the other hand, there are tests that involve microscopy, for example, a blood test to look at blood cells or if you're doing a urine test, and then they're looking at cells in the urine, and so forth. Anytime a microscope is involved, then you're talking days?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes.
"... We are basically digitizing these samples, whichever goes into a microscope so that a pathologist can basically see these tests or see these cells or samples in very high resolution from elsewhere, sitting elsewhere..."
Sal Daher: What's the problem you're solving and how you're doing it?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: We are basically digitizing these samples, whichever goes into a microscope so that a pathologist can basically see these tests or see these cells or samples in very high resolution from elsewhere, sitting elsewhere. That is very important today because if you see the number of labs in the country, for example, in the US, we have 170,000 labs, but you hardly have 18,000 pathologists. For every 10 labs, you have one pathologist. You have to go visit multiple labs in order to report these tests.
Digital pathology has been here for a while. If you look back, it has been there since year 2000 or even 1999, somewhere around that time. It has not scaled because the digital pathology scanners are so expensive. It will cost hundreds and thousands of dollars. The reasonable average cost start from 100,000 and it will go all the way to half a million dollars. Not a lot of hospitals or all hospitals, or all pathology labs can afford that kind of budget.
That's where we have basically come up with a very innovative engineering solution, that reduces that cost by a lot, at least by a factor of 10. If a usual machine would cost $100,000, with us, it will cost at least one-eighth in that range, without compromising on quality.
Sal Daher: On quality? What the machine is doing is putting a drop of the patient's blood on a glass slide, and then smearing it, so that you spread the blood to what thickness? Is that one-cell thickness?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes.
Sal Daher: To the point where you don't have a cell stacked on top of a cell, so it smears it and it covers with a plate, and then you are ready for a microscope to look at it.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: You have to stain it before you look into the microscope.
Sal Daher: A staining process. The smearing is the physical motion of two plates of glass. The staining, how is the staining done?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Staining is done, for example, you have taken example of blood. Blood is one of the most voluminous tests in microscope, we call it blood smear test, or peripheral blood smear test. It's a three-step process. You smear it, as you just said. Usually, it's done with a hand, in order to reduce those inconsistencies, which are introduced manually. We have made a smearing device that smears it in a perfect fashion, where you get a perfect tongue-shaped smear. Where it produces a single-layer thick sample, we call it monolayer. Then you stain it. Basically, these cells are invisible under microscope. They don't have inherent color, especially the WBCs and platelets.
Sal Daher: WBC, white blood cells. Yes. Please, continue.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes. White blood cells, platelets. RBC, do have color. They are red in color.
Sal Daher: Yes. Red blood cells.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes, red blood cells, but the rest of the two cells needs to be stained. That's where-- We call it Romanowsky stains. They are microscopic stains, which basically are higher to the nucleus cytoplasmic components, the cell membrane and make them visible under a microscope, and then you'll give it to a pathologist.
Sal Daher: The staining, is it like a drop of something that's dropped on a smeared sample?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes. Usually, you need to drop at least eight drops and then dilute it with a buffer. We have automated that as well so that, there is no manual inconsistency, so on and so forth. The last step is the analysis. You put it in the microscope and the pathologist comes, sees, quantifies these cells, and writes down a report.
Sal Daher: You get this monolayer, that's one cell thick, so to speak. That is then stained and buffered, so then you put another slide on top.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes, it depends. If it's a blood smear, you don't have to put a cover slip, but if its histopathology, if it's a tissue, you have to put a cover slip
Sal Daher: Histopathology tissue. Wait, our listeners are familiar with histopathobio because they're doing histopathology. The staining involved, there's grossing of the sample.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes.
Sal Daher: All right. Then that slide goes into your machine, and your machine takes very high-resolution images of the particular cells, with the microscope of the cells of interest, and puts them on a user panel.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes. Basically, captures a large area of monolayer and finds out all these WBCs. For example, again, this is very specific to blood smear, but you can do lots of stuff with other types of samples too, and to just continue on the blood smear. Usually, what happens is when a abnormal sample comes into a lab and goes for microscopy, a pathologist will have to quantify these cells, quantify these white blood cells.
If it is a manual counter, he'll be in front of a microscope, where he'll be having the sample in hand because you realize, these samples are not digital, these are physical samples. You have to be there in the lab physically. Since we have now digitized that sample, you can quantify it easily using machine learning algorithms.
Sal Daher: All right. Instead of the pathologists, he or she's sitting at the microscope counting how many of these white blood cells there are in the sample, and then maybe saying something about their shape or that kind of thing, you have a machine learning algorithm that recognizes the white blood cells, and knows how many they are in that area?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes.
"... That's where Livo comes in. You directly jump right into the report, and the second problem is you don't have to in the first place travel there..."
Sal Daher: It's not the machine learning algorithm that makes the diagnosis or makes the description, it's the pathologist but what it's doing is teeing it up, so to speak, for the pathologist?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes. It's doing two things. It's eliminating the quantification requirement that has to be done manually so that they can directly jump into the actual diagnosis part. For them having the best resolution possible is of utmost importance, so that they can see the chromatin pattern, they can see the granules properly, and write down the actual report. That's where Livo comes in. You directly jump right into the report, and the second problem is you don't have to in the first place travel there. You can report cases from multiple labs, multiple hospitals, from single platforms, from Livo's platform. This way, you can address this problem of having this almost 1:10 ratio of number of hospital labs, yes, and the pathologist.
Sal Daher: One pathologist for every 10 hospital labs, it gives superpowers to the pathologists. Now, they're super-pathologists. Livo.ai makes super-pathologists who can do much more work because the whole task is simplified. What about the design? Do you care to describe what about the design has allowed you to create a device that costs so much less than the devices on the market at present?
What Makes This Device So Affordable
Dr. Junaid Shaik: To begin with, right for example when you take blood smear, blood smear and bone marrow, these are the only two microscopy-based test that mean the highest resolution possible, which is 1000 times magnification. That is achieved with a lens called 100x lens, 100x objective lens. It's super high resolution. In fact, that's the highest resolution. You can't go beyond that. The physics, the diffraction limit-- The problem with scanning in that resolution is its depth of field is so narrow. It's basically 200 nanometers.
Sal Daher: Ah, so the zone within which it's in focus is so tiny that any vibration, any distortion, or anything like that, you're out of focus, you can't see it. Depth of field, for those who are not familiar with it, is the area, if you're already farther than this in focus, but if it's outside that zone, it's out of focus.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Out of focus. It can be above, it can be below 100%, yes.
Sal Daher: Yes, it can't be seen. The depth of field is very, very narrow, you end up with something that's extremely hard to focus on objects.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes. Yes. Yes. For 40x lens itself, it's super hard, because the 40x lens object to depth of field is 1.4, 1,3 microns, but with 100x, it's like in steroids. You have nanometers. It's half of the length of a wavelength of light, right? You realize-
Sal Daher: [chuckles] Half a wavelength of light. Okay. That's small. That's extremely small.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: In order to focus then, it usually takes very high-precision materials, precision actuators, like piezoelectric actuators, or magnetic actuators. Most of the current applications use, current microscopy-based system use that, but the problem is it escalates your costs. That's the exact reason why you don't see a lot of digital pathology adaption, even after 20 years of it coming into existence.
Sal Daher: Just for lay listeners, when you hear piezoelectric, it's a material that when it's pressured, it releases electric current, piezoelectricity. That's used as like a sensor of pressure. Okay, so please continue.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: You have the actuator-based, piezoelectric-based actuators that are used in microscopy-based applications, especially for z-axis that solves this depth of focus problem.
Sal Daher: Actuators. Okay, so it's the other way around. You put a current, it expands?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes. That escalates the costs. What we have done is we have come up with a three-point stage that basically tilts the slide in between a equilateral triangle. Imagine microscope slide and put there points around that slide. We basically focus the slide in six degrees of freedom so that it basically remains in focus till you basically complete your scan. If you don't do that, when you take a picture, it may not be focused, right? This is the first time anybody has ever done this in microscopy, and that's what has allowed our cost to basically be one-tenth of the BOM of the average competition. It's not in tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, it's in thousands.
Sal Daher: Now, is this design amenable to a patent protection?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes. Yes. We are working with a top US-based patent attorney who is helping us with this patent and the number of patents that are derived from this core technology are humongous. This has multiple applications outside too but as of now we are just limiting our patent production to microscopy-based.
Sal Daher: I should let that this podcast is sponsored by Fish & Richardson, Peter Fassa of Fish & Richardson which is the country's top patent law firm, just letting you know.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: [laughs] Yes, I think this is where we think we can take this at a mass scale and help pathologists be that super pathologists that they deserve.
Sal Daher: Right, this is very, very interesting, fascinating. Dr. Junaid Shaik, how does Livo.ai plan to make money? Are you going to make money by selling the devices? Are you going to make money by charging like a leasing fee, or a service fee for the device?
How Livo.ai Will Bring in Revenue
Dr. Junaid Shaik: I would say we are in a price discovery phase, so we are experimenting different models and what we prefer is to remove the friction for adaption, since the cost is so low. We are looking to basically give the machine to the hospital, or the hospital lab, or the pathology lab, on some security deposit which is less than $5,000, or something of that sort, and then take a monthly fee, so it's like a rent.
Sal Daher: Like a rent, that sounds recurring income, that sounds like a good thing, and the hospital if they're not finding it useful, they don't have cost. If they're finding it useful they're using the machine, you know that they're using the machine because it's monitored, and everything, and so then the more they use the machine the more money you make. You have an incentive to enrich the experience with the same equipment, is this something that's amenable to software upgrades where the experience gets better, and better, and better?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes.
Sal Daher: Presumably, because you have a learning set, the machine learning gets better, and better, you have your own learning set. How did you train your machine vision with this? How did you acquire the learning set?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes, great question, so we have worked with multiple hospitals, so one of the main key hospital that has helped us in collaborating with this data set is Indo-American Cancer Institute, it's based out of Hyderabad in the southern part of India. Lots of US patients, lots of Indian patients, it's like a mix, so India is known for this medical tourism nowadays. We had to cover multiple populations.
Sal Daher: Let me just add a little note here because when you talk about a drop of blood, evil thoughts immediately start going in the direction of Theranos.
[laughter]
Sal Daher: I must confess that Dr. Sudir Manda, who is closely listening to this podcast, he is an angel investor, he had the same thought and so he visited your facilities in India, and saw the device working, and so forth, so he ascertained himself that this is for real. It's just that people might think, "Medical device, drop of blood, ah."
[laughter]
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes.
Sal Daher: Anyway, that aside, so the business model you're thinking about renting it, you've built your training model in a leading medical facilities in Hyderabad in India, and now you are domesticating your company in the US, you're relocating in the US, hoping to bring this to the United States.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes, so we have commercialized this in India, we come under Class One, we have CDC approval, and now we are looking to file for USFDA, with the next round. In fact, whatever, I just told you has all been done in $600,000 I would say a pre-seeding, in a pre-seeding stage now, so it'll allow us to start pre-commercialization exercises here in the US.
Sal Daher: That's doing a lot with very little, very impressive.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes, I would say it's a great team, so when you have the right people and you basically know what exactly that you have to do, and you have the time, money requirement becomes a lot less.
Sal Daher: Actually, just for the transcriber, Junaid Shaik, it's J-U-N-A-I-D, Dr. Junaid, Shaik is S-H-A-I-K. Now, do you want to talk about some of your colleagues that you mention in your team?
Dr. Junaid Shaikh: Sure, so I have Faisal, he's the CTO, he is a tremendous guy. He has experience. He's an industry veteran, right? He has more than 13 years of experience in digital pathology space. He has been working with-
Sal Daher: Could you just spell his name for the transcriber?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: It's F-A-I-S-A-L.
Sal Daher: F-A-I-S-A-L. Faisal.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes.
Sal Daher: Faisal. Faisal is a technologist, a physician?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Faisal is an engineer, right?
Sal Daher: An engineer.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes. Robotics engineer, who has experience in robotic microscopy, more than 13 years of experience. Before joining Livo, he was with DSS Olympus. It's the Indian subsidiary of Olympus, which is the largest microscope manufacturer in the world. Before that he was with Sun Pharma, working with them in their R&D digital pathology division. We have Pavan. He's, he was working with Infosys before joining Livo.
Sal Daher: Infosys much in the news these days, the new Prime Minister. I don't know if when this episode launches, he'll still be Prime Minister, but-
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes.
Sal Daher: How do you spell his name? P-A-V, as in Victor, A-N?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes.
Sal Daher: Pavan. Very good.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes. Pavan is a software guy, so he knows in and out of software platforms, cloud platforms, databases, backend, frontend, you name it.
Sal Daher: Okay. The composition of the team is a physician who is conversant with pathology and also software and that side. Then you have a technologist who is conversant of robotics and optics, coming out of this Olympus subsidiary. Then you have computer technologist, who's the software person. This is extremely, extremely exciting team. With $600,000 in capital that you've managed to get this far, it is just very impressive. Tremendous capital efficiency.
Dr. Junaid, I thought I would, do a little promo and then the second half, we'll get a little bit more about your journey, how the company came about, how you decided to become a founder, having been a physician. Well, the promo for the podcast takes form of a ask to listeners, to people who like what they're hearing here, because the podcast is designed to help people learn.
If you learn something from the podcast, take the trouble to go to Apple Podcasts and leave rating. We hope it's a five star rating and leave a written review. Yes, you can be critical of us in the written review. Just give us a five star rating. Written review, as long as it's written, "Sal talks too much, but the podcast is still worth listening to." That's fine. Okay.
It means that someone took the trouble of having some sentences and the algorithm at Apple picks it up and shows it to more people, and therefore that episode gets picked up. The time to do that, if you like a particular episode, as soon as you listen to it, the week after the launch date is like a golden period for an episode. If one or two reviews go up, because I have like 170-something reviews-- One or two reviews go up, lots more people listen to the podcast because it gets shown by Apple.
I think something similar happens over at, the Play Store. Google, but I'm not familiar with that universe anyway, so give us a hand with that. Subscribe to the podcast little plus button follow us so that, you know, the podcast will show up in your feed. Then you'll listen to fascinating, fascinating founders and interesting and experienced angels on this podcast. I'm very grateful that Dr. Junaid Shaik for being on-- Dr. Junaid, you're a physician. Where are you from in India?
Dr. Junaid's Background
Dr. Junaid Shaik: I'm from Hyderabad.
Sal Daher: From Hyderabad. Okay. The south of India.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes.
Sal Daher: Okay. You studied medicine, practiced medicine.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Not really. I have basically started a company called X-Lab when I was in second year medical school.
Sal Daher: Okay.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: I had learned machine learning and Java at at a young age, and that's how I started programming apps.
Sal Daher: Okay.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes. I tried my hand in easing some of the pains of my professors through these apps. I eventually, what gave me success in as a very small, like teenager success was with the app called Launcher-X, which, basically predicts what app you would need next, right? In 2012, 2013 processing power and battery were major issues. Finding what app you would need next would let you use the phone lot lesser, because if you want to find anything, which is not Google, or which is not a phone app, would usually take few seconds, right? I sold that app to Australian based company for reasonable-- In hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Sal Daher: Wow. As a teenager?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes. As a teenager.
Sal Daher: Okay, Well, Jeez. Do you come from an entrepreneurial family?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes. My great grandfather was entrepreneur in the sense that he was in transportation industry. He used to make buses. He used to basically make, manufacture buses and operate them as well, but my dad and my immediate family knows zero entrepreneurship. Yes. And this early success basically opened up my mind.
Sal Daher: You're a very hard student. Being a hard student means you're very in the box. You don’t have time to waste with silly games and stuff like that. You just, you're all in because in India getting into a competitive university is brutal. It's totally merit-based. You take an exam. Where you come in on the exam, you get in or you don’t get it. It's dog eat dog. How did you get the bandwidth to think about starting this app company?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: I would say it started as a hobby, right? I started utilizing the free time and I didn’t really think that it would be a business. I started that as a hobby. I just released it on app store and I didn’t really care about it that much until this download started climbing up like crazy.
Sal Daher: That reminds me of the founder of Splitwise. Have you heard of Splitwise? It's an app splitting expenses.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes. I use it.
Sal Daher: You use it?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes. I use it.
“...I understand that what pushed you to start Livo.ai is that you had a tragic experience in medical school…”
Sal Daher: Well, I'm an investor in Splitwise and the founder of Splitwise, John, was doing his PhD in Physics at Harvard and he had this problem when he went out to eat with his friends, splitting the bill. He created a spreadsheet and he put it I think on the website. An easy spreadsheet for sharing expenses. He got 100,000 downloads. Okay? He said, "Wait a second. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What if I create an app that's even more user friendly than a spreadsheet?" That’s how Splitwise came about. It was like one of this throw away projects by a brilliant person John Bittner. I should have him on the podcast. Anyway, that is fascinating. Also, I understand that what pushed you to start Livo.ai is that you had a tragic experience in medical school.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes. You usually see this in normal patient pool itself, where I saw my own senior getting fever and when you are a medical student you have that swagger, right?
Sal Daher: Indian English where senior means a student who's a year ahead of you.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes. A year ahead of me. He just got fever. You won't suspect anything out of that. We do get fevers now and then. When we do get it, you basically take aspirin or Paracetamol. We take Paracetamol in India which is basically the same thing NSAID.
Sal Daher: Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug. Yes.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes. Analgesic, right?
Sal Daher: Yes.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: It reduces your pain. He took those pills and what that does it is basically suppresses fever and if it's a normal bacterial or viral fever, it will go away. Your body will eventually take care of it and it will go away, but if it's something serious, say early stages of leukemia you have done a blunder.
Sal Daher: You have suppressed the fever, it masked the disease, but disease continues to grow.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Continuous to grow. Yes. The very next month he went into blast crisis, where you basically fall down, faint, and when your blood panel is done, it clearly shows that that disease has progressed to a different level. It's unrecoverable now. Usually what we see in practice is when a patient comes with early stages of leukemia, who's slipping into cancer, the treatment now is great.
We have this drug called ATRA, which basically it treats the leukemia when you come in early stages, but when you enter into blast crisis and if it has progressed enough, then there is no coming back.
Unfortunately, he passed away and, when I started going back from there, so how did this come about to be? He is a medical student and we should know better, right? If you see the actual patient pool, this happens all the time, right? People take self Aspirin or Paracetamol. For people who have leukemia, and they take, and they wouldn't know, and they take Paracetamol and for them, it'll be too late. To go back when he got recurrent fevers, he had his blood panel done. Nothing suspicious was there in his CBC. CBC will only give you the count, right? It's the microscopy examination that tells you whether these, the cells that are counted are normal or abnormal. That was not done right, and that's not done because it takes time.
Sal Daher: CBC can you unpack, CBC is?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: CBC is complete blood count.
Sal Daher: Complete blood count. It just counts the number of white cells, but it doesn't say that you have abnormal white blood cells.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes.
Sal Daher: Since leukemia is a blood cancer you have to categorize, look at the cells to see if they're abnormal. Oh. Just for the transcriber, would you say again, what is the standard treatment for leukemia, if it's got early.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: A-T-R-A.
Sal Daher: A as in Alfred, T as in Tom, R Robert. A Alfred.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes.
Sal Daher: What does that stand for?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: All-trans retinoic acid. There is AT02 which is arsenic trioxide. These are used to treat leukemia.
Sal Daher: They disrupt the abnormal growth of these cancer cells.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes.
Sal Daher: If caught in time. Basically what happened to your classmate who was one year ahead of you in medical school is that he did a blood exam. They looked at the white blood cell count. He didn't have an infection because the white blood cell count was not elevated, but they didn't look at the shape of the white blood cells to find out that he actually had abnormal white blood cells, which might have given a hint that he had leukemia. The reason is that is a much harder exam that requires a pathologist, which are in very short supply, 10 hospitals, one pathologist. You're hoping that your technology, if it's installed in every single hospital, would pick something like that right up?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes.
Sal Daher: Maybe prioritize it. Maybe you scan it and it might say, this scan contains cells that look suspicious. The pathologist needs to look at it right away.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes. That's the idea. Right? We are actually doing it.
Sal Daher: Awesome.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: We have had impact on more than 800 patients since in just last four months. Right. Since we have commercialized this in India with just six centers.
Sal Daher: Okay. 800 patients have had abnormal readings detected by your system.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes.
Sal Daher: How many machines are operating at the moment?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: We have six commercial installations right now in India. We have a backlog of, another six orders, which we are yet to fulfill. That's where we are raising this.
Sal Daher: Okay. It's fascinating that you've covered this journey and now you're coming to the US, I understand you're at Silicon Valley right now.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes. I'm in the Bay area. We have come here on the crunch as a startup battle for company. We have been selected of thousands to present here. We have had follow-up meetings.
Sal Daher: Tech Crunch, What is it called? Tech Crunch.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Tech Tech Crunch Disrupt.
Sal Daher: Tech Crunch, Disrupt. Yes. The publication Tech Crunch has a competition. You're participating in that?
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes.
Sal Daher: Okay. If I had any input to this I'd say this is heck of a disrupting technology, even though it's not doing something new, but it's doing something that makes it much cheaper because of much better design.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes.
Sal Daher: Excellent.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Yes. Hopefully, I'll be in Boston too, soon.
Sal Daher: Awesome. Well, so at this point I'll thank you for making time from your busy schedule to be on the Angel Invest Boston podcast, another shoutout to Dr. Sudhir Manda, for connecting us. Let's see where this exciting company is going to go.
Dr. Junaid Shaik: Thank you so much for having me Sal. I'm very grateful for your time and having me on your podcast
Sal Daher: Listeners, Livo.ai, you can go find out about it. This is Angel Invest Boston. I'm Sal Daher.
[music]
I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.