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IDG Ventures, Erasmic Invest $3.5M
In Medical Electronics Firm Perfint
IDG Ventures India and Erasmic
Venture Fund together have invested $3.5 million in
Perfint, a Chennai-based medical electronics company. IDG
Ventures and early/seed stage fund Erasmic, both Bangalore-based,
have invested $3 million and $500K, respectively. Perfint
is founded by S Nandakumar, B D Vijaya and a team of
healthcare device professionals who were earlier associated
with GE Healthcare in India.
Perfint has developed PIGA, a high tech medical positioning
device that can help in clinical applications such as biopsy
and other soft tissue procedures. In technical terms, it is
a tool positioner for Image Guided Minimally Invasive (IG-MI)
procedures. They support applications such as fine needle
aspiration (FNA), biopsy and RF Ablation (RFA) of small tumors
in the lung and the abdomen. PIGA is expected to be launched
in India in early 2008. PIGA is under clinical evaluation
at this moment. The various image guided interventions (IG-MI)
are biopsy (IG diagnosis), radiation (IG therapy) and IG surgery.
The global market for minimally invasive image-guided interventions
is currently over $3 billion. However, currently only less
than 15 per cent of all surgeries are performed using IG-MI
approach. “With increasing healthcare awareness and ever
improving hospital infrastructure across the world, guided
procedures for early stage cancer diagnosis, drug delivery
etc, are estimated to grow from under 10-15 per cent of total
procedures done today to about 50-60 per cent by 2010. That
presents a huge opportunity for devices such as PIGA”
said Sudhir Sethi, Chairman and founding managing director
of IDG Ventures India. The company plans to target the emerging
markets initially and will look at entering the US markets
in 2009, according to S. Nandakumar, co-founder and CEO of
Perfint. IDG’s Sudhir Sethi and Ranjith Menon, and Erasmic’s
Subrata Mitra will join the board of Perfint.
IDG Ventures has been making several high tech investments
in India. Its most recent investment was 3D Solid compression
Pvt Ltd, a 3D visualisation startup incubated at Stanford
University and Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Its
other investments include retail analytics firm Manthan Software
Services, B2C online gaming company Kreeda Games, Sasken Communications
spin-out Connect M Technology Solutions, and network security
company iViz.
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