Gates Foundation grants Remidio to deploy AI retinal scans for pregnancy screening across Africa and India
What's the deal? The Bill & Melinda Gates FoundationDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has granted funding to Remidio Innovative SolutionsDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → to deploy AI-powered retinal scans that screen pregnant women for pre-eclampsia, anaemia, and gestational diabetes — conditions that kill tens of thousands of mothers each year in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
Remidio's platform uses a portable, smartphone-based fundus camera that frontline health workers can operate with minimal training. A scan takes seconds. Its AI models, trained on large and diverse image datasets, detect microvascular changes in the retina that signal systemic conditions linked to pregnancy complications.
The grant will fund deployment across partner sites in Africa and India — regions that together bear the largest share of global maternal and perinatal deaths.
Why now? Around 2 million stillbirths occur globally each year — one every 16 seconds — and 84% happen in LMICs. Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, particularly pre-eclampsia, contribute to an estimated 42,000 maternal deaths annually. Gestational diabetes affects roughly one in six pregnancies worldwide, with the highest rates concentrated in the same regions.
Early detection of these conditions typically requires lab work, biochemical biomarkers, and Doppler-based assessments — tools that depend on infrastructure, trained specialists, and referral pathways that barely exist at the community level in most LMICs. For the majority of pregnant women in these regions, early risk screening simply doesn't happen.
"The women most at risk from pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes are often the least likely to reach a laboratory or a specialist in time," said Dr Anand SivaramanDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, chief executive officer and founding director of Remidio.
What could go wrong? The science linking retinal microvascular changes to systemic disease is well established, but applying it to pregnancy screening at scale is new territory. Remidio's chief medical officer, Dr Divya Rao, acknowledged as much: "Evidence, not assumption, will decide where this proves useful."
Deploying in remote, resource-poor settings adds complexity — from connectivity issues to training gaps to ensuring follow-up care when the AI flags a risk. Without functioning referral pathways, early detection alone won't save lives.
The signal: Remidio, classified as a "breakout" stage company on Dealroom, is making a notable pivot from established ophthalmology diagnostics into antenatal care — a move that could significantly widen its addressable market if the clinical evidence holds up. The Gates Foundation's backing, as a non-profit investor, underscores that the commercial healthtech playbook of repurposing validated AI platforms for adjacent clinical use cases is now being mirrored in global health, where the unmet need is vast but the path to sustainable deployment remains unproven.
Read more: CNBC-TV18
Image: fundus photograph by Jan Kaláb, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
