BackDiabeto MedTech | Sugar monitoring made easy
Diabeto is a non-intrusive Bluetooth-powered fist-sized device that transfers glucose readings from a glucometer to a mobile device which can then be sent to a smartphone app and shared with a doctor, eliminating the need for visits to a clinic
Premium
Enterprise name: Diabeto MedTech India Pvt. Ltd
Entrepreneurs: Amir Shaikh (45), Hemanshu Jain (29), Shreekant Pawar (32)
Founded: January 2012
Location: Mumbai
Brand name: Diabeto
After my dad lost a file with over a 100 blood sugar readings, carefully collected and manually stored over the 30 years that he has been battling with diabetes, I decided to create a wireless device that could read and store blood sugar readings, and that is how the idea for Diabeto was born," said Shreekant Pawar, 32, a former B.Pharm student at University of Mumbai and MBA from University of Northampton, UK, who co-founded three technology start-ups before Diabeto.
Pawar roped in childhood friend, Hemanshu Jain, a mechanical engineer from Visvesvaraya Technological University, who co-founded start-up Farasbee focused on digital marketing with Pawar in October 2010. Amir Shaikh, an electrical engineer from McGill University, Canada, and Diabeto’s third co-founder, is based in the US and is himself a serial entrepreneur-turned angel investor. After working with Pawar at digital technology start-up, YouSendIt Inc. that Shaikh co-founded, he invested in Pawar’s earlier animation start-up, Toon Media in 2009. Shaikh invested $30,000 in Diabeto in January 2012, helping the company to prototype the product.
Diabeto is a non-intrusive Bluetooth-powered fist-sized device that enables the transfer of glucose readings from a glucometer into a mobile device and displays and stores the information on a cloud server, which can then be sent to a smartphone app, to be shared with a doctor, eliminating the necessity of a clinical visit. In November 2012, Diabeto received a $40,000 grant after it was selected in Start-up Chile, a start-up incubation programme started by the Chilean government. This helped make Diabeto launch-ready, allowing the founders, along with a team of five, to outsource production of the device to a 3D printing company in Mumbai. Diabeto then went into alpha-testing mode in July 2014, when Diabeto partnered with the University College of London (UCL) to distribute a few devices for trials, and also launched an online trial campaign around the same time which saw 200 people from 22 countries volunteer to test the product. While these initial trials helped fix a number of bugs, Diabeto will next launch a campaign on start-up crowdfunding platform Indiegogo.com, from which it hopes to raise $10,000 to commercially launch Diabeto by May or June 2015. Diabeto has received 500 pre-orders to date for the device which is priced at $50.
The founders are also looking to add more features to the product to make it a health device that can be used by anyone, and it is in talks with dieticians and diabetologists to launch a health platform at a later stage. “We are also in talks with Nasscom and Google for funding to take these plans forward, after our products hit the market," added Pawar.
Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!
