Building a Global AI Venture for Medical Imaging Analysis from India: Prashant Warier, CEO of Qure.ai (Part 7 )

Sramana Mitra: The lifetime value of the customer is much higher.

Prashant Warier: I don’t think we have had more than one or two churn. That means a lot to me. The lifetime value is high. Also, it takes time to activate a market. Once there is a reasonable number of users in a certain market, that is when you start seeing the cost of sales become low. Initially, you might have to spend a lot. If you look at the cost of sales, you might not be making money on that particular customer. Then you are hoping that you’ll make money on the 31st customer.

Sramana Mitra: Definitely. Reference customers make a huge difference.

Prashant Warier: To some extent, they help in getting to a point where there are a lot of customers. Reference customers might mean four or five. If you get five to 10, then everybody is aware of Qure.ai. You get to a point where people are questioning why they’re not using AI.

Sramana Mitra: To reach to that, you needed to cross the stage of reference customers.

Prashant Warier: Yes, reference customers come first. Even with reference customers, you still have to do 15 to 20 calls to convert a customer. Then you come to a point where everybody knows you. That’s beyond the reference customer stage.

Sramana Mitra: Is $16 million the only money?

Prashant Warier: We raised $40 million last year. That was from Novo Holdings. They invested in Qure.ai. There’s an Indian healthcare-focused fund called HealthQuad. They invested last year.

Sramana Mitra: What revenue level are you at?

Prashant Warier: I cannot precisely tell you. I would say above $20 million.

Sramana Mitra: What is the structure of the company? You are doing all your development work in Mumbai still?

Prashant Warier: We have a team in Mumbai and Bangalore. A lot of our tech team is in Bangalore. Development is exclusively in India.

Sramana Mitra: You have sales team in other places.

Prashant Warier: Yes, we have sales, business development, and customer success teams in about 10 countries.

Sramana Mitra: I love what you’re doing and I love how you navigated it. Anything else that you want to share before we finish?

Prashant Warier: One thing that I didn’t talk about much was that research is critical in getting to success in this space. You have to work with some of the top organizations in the world. We worked with Harvard Medical School. We worked with Mayo Clinic. These are not customers. These are people who partnered with us in validating our solutions.

Getting a lot of data is critical. Second is doing quality research. Coming out of India, that was an even bigger requirement. The credibility might be slightly lower coming from India. Building that credibility is critical. We focused on publishing in high-quality journals.

Sramana Mitra: Double-click down on that. Tell us what your team looks like on the research side.

Prashant Warier: Right now, we have about a hundred plus people in data science, engineering, and clinical research. 10 to 15 are clinicians. These are clinicians that are either product managers or they’re working on the regulatory side. About 40 to 50 data scientists are basically building the algorithms. Data science and algorithm is only a very small part of the product. There is a lot of other engineering work. There is also the deployment team. It’s a remote virtual deployment. That is the tech team that we have.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic! Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Building a Global AI Venture for Medical Imaging Analysis from India: Prashant Warier, CEO of Qure.ai
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