You must have heard that your retina has a lot of information related to you stored inside it and we are not just talking about your genes and all that stuff but we are also talking about your current health condition as well as any unlikely health condition that might have gone undetected but can be detected by your retina scans. This is the reason why doctors recommend taking a retina scan every now and then so as to make sure that your eyes are fine and your retina is also intact along with some underlying health conditions as well.
Now, we have a new retina scanning startup named as Mediwhale which has just raised $9M in its latest round of funding and it is worth noting that the co-founder and CEO Kevin Choi got this idea when he found out at the age of just 24 that he had lost nearly half of one of his eyes’ vision due to a condition known as glaucoma. Kevin Choi said that “I was devastated and could not believe this was happening to me,”. “There were no [initial] symptoms for me to recognize. If this had been diagnosed and treated early, I could have saved my vision.”
Mediwhale’s first product is known as “Reti-CVD, an AI-powered retinal diagnostic solution that assesses the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in patients”. Reti-CVD helps in “early detection and assessment of CVD risks would let users start statin therapy early for CVD intermediate and high-risk groups”. It is worth noting that Kevin claims that with the help of Mediwhale’s technology, the results can be given in just under a minute. Currently, CVD risks are assessed based on CT scans which work but the fact that you are being exposed to lots of radiation and high wait times as well as huge costs are reasons why a lot of people avoid taking these tests. Mediwhale is currently focusing on patients who don’t have CVD but can develop them in the future due to pre-existing conditions and is currently operational in South Korea with plans for expansion in the US.