Every year, tuberculosis kills more people in India than almost any other infectious disease. Most of these deaths are preventable — TB is curable when detected early and treated correctly. The problem is detection. A chest X-ray can reveal TB, but reading a chest X-ray accurately requires a trained radiologist, and India has a severe shortage of radiologists, particularly in the rural areas where TB burden is highest. Qure.ai was founded to solve this problem, and its $65 million Series D is a bet that the solution scales globally.
What Qure.ai Actually Does
Qure.ai builds AI software that reads medical images — chest X-rays, CT scans, MRIs — and identifies abnormalities with accuracy that matches or exceeds trained radiologists. The company's flagship product, qXR, analyses chest X-rays for 28 different findings, including tuberculosis, pneumonia, lung cancer, and COVID-19. The analysis takes seconds and can be performed on standard hardware, making it deployable in settings that lack the infrastructure for traditional radiology services.
The company's technology has been validated in peer-reviewed studies published in major medical journals, and it has received regulatory clearances in multiple countries including India, the United States, and the European Union.
The Series D and What It Funds
The $65 million Series D will fund three primary initiatives: geographic expansion across Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America; product expansion into brain MRI, bone X-rays, and retinal imaging; and infrastructure for serving a global customer base at scale.
The Global Health Opportunity
There are an estimated 1.5 billion chest X-rays taken globally every year, and a significant fraction are read by radiologists who are overworked, undertrained, or simply not available. In low- and middle-income countries, the shortage of radiologists is acute — the World Health Organization estimates that Sub-Saharan Africa has fewer than 2,000 radiologists for a population of over a billion people. AI radiology tools like Qure.ai's extend the reach of radiological expertise to settings where radiologists are not available.
India as a Proving Ground
Qure.ai has deployed its technology in government TB screening programmes across multiple Indian states, processing millions of X-rays and identifying tens of thousands of TB cases that might otherwise have been missed. This deployment at scale in a resource-constrained environment has forced the company to build technology that is robust, efficient, and genuinely useful in the real world. The lessons learned in India are directly applicable to the global markets Qure.ai is now entering.