Funding News

Bengaluru's Remidio Has Just Received a Gates Foundation Grant to Use AI Retinal Imaging to Predict Pre-Eclampsia and Gestational Diabetes in India

By Mustafa Shariff, Editor in Chief · June 16,2026 · 2 min read

Summary

• Remidio Gates Foundation Grant: AI Retinal Imaging for Maternal Health Screening in India and LMICs
• Remidio Innovative Solutions has received a Gates Foundation grant to advance its Oculomics platform for maternal health screening using AI retinal imaging for pre-eclampsia, anemia, and gestational diabetes.

"The women most at risk from pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes are often the least likely to reach a laboratory or specialist in time. A retinal image takes seconds and can be captured by a frontline worker with minimal training. That is the premise of this entire programme."

Remidio Innovative Solutions, a Bengaluru-based healthcare technology company, has announced that it has received a grant from the Gates Foundation to advance its Oculomics platform for maternal health applications in low- and middle-income countries, with a primary focus on India and several nations in Africa. The initiative harnesses retinal imaging and artificial intelligence to improve early risk assessment for major pregnancy-related complications, specifically pre-eclampsia, anemia, and gestational diabetes mellitus.

Remidio's existing clinical deployment provides the foundation for this expansion. The company's portable, smartphone-based retinal imaging platform — designed for operation by frontline healthcare workers without specialist ophthalmic training — is already widely used in India for diabetic retinopathy screening, glaucoma detection, and age-related macular degeneration programmes. The extension to maternal health represents a new clinical application for an established technology and deployment infrastructure.

Why Retinal Imaging for Maternal Health

The scientific basis for the Oculomics approach to maternal health screening lies in the retina's unique status as the only part of the central nervous system that can be directly visualised non-invasively. The blood vessels of the retina are structurally and functionally similar to blood vessels throughout the body — particularly the cerebral and placental vasculature. Changes in retinal blood vessel calibre, tortuosity, and branching patterns have been associated in research studies with systemic vascular conditions, including hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and pre-eclampsia.

Dr Anand Sivaraman, Chief Executive Officer and Founding Director of Remidio, articulated the access rationale directly: the women most at risk from pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes are often the least likely to reach a laboratory or specialist in time. A retinal image takes seconds and can be captured by a frontline worker with minimal training — and that accessibility is precisely what makes it potentially transformative for primary healthcare settings in rural India and low-resource health systems globally.

Pre-eclampsia — characterised by high blood pressure and organ dysfunction, typically in the second half of pregnancy — affects an estimated 2-8% of pregnancies globally and is a leading cause of maternal and perinatal mortality. In India, hypertensive disorders of pregnancy are among the top causes of maternal death, disproportionately affecting women in rural areas who have limited access to the blood pressure monitoring, proteinuria testing, and specialist obstetric care that enable early detection. Gestational diabetes similarly affects a large proportion of Indian pregnancies — nearly one in six globally — with significantly higher rates in South Asian populations due to genetic susceptibility and nutritional factors.

The Gates Foundation Grant and What It Funds

The Gates Foundation grant will fund research to determine whether retinal imaging can serve as an earlier identification method for high-risk pregnancies in under-resourced settings where laboratory diagnostics are unavailable or inaccessible. The research programme will collect retinal images from pregnant women alongside standard clinical measurements, building a dataset to train and validate AI models that can identify pregnancy complication risk from retinal images alone.

If successful, the validated Oculomics maternal health platform could be deployed at primary health centre level — using Remidio's existing smartphone-compatible imaging hardware — providing millions of pregnant women in India and Africa with a risk stratification tool that was previously unavailable to them. The clinical protocol would not require additional laboratory equipment or specialist training: a community health worker would capture a retinal image during a routine antenatal visit, and the AI model would immediately generate a risk score that guides whether the woman needs urgent specialist referral.

BHC Perspective

At Bengaluru Health Community, the Remidio Gates Foundation grant is a story about our city's medical technology ecosystem earning global funding recognition for a genuinely important clinical application. Remidio has built one of India's most credible AI medical imaging platforms, deployed at scale in clinical settings before seeking prestigious research funding. For BHC founders in AI diagnostics, maternal health technology, or primary care tools — Remidio's trajectory from Bengaluru startup to Gates Foundation grantee is the model.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is Remidio's Oculomics platform?
A: A portable, smartphone-based retinal imaging platform using AI to detect systemic disease from retinal images. Now being extended to maternal health screening for pre-eclampsia, anemia, and gestational diabetes in pregnant women at primary care level in India and Africa.

Q: Why can retinal imaging detect pregnancy complications?
A: The retinal vasculature mirrors blood vessel changes throughout the body, including hypertensive changes associated with pre-eclampsia. AI analysis of retinal images can potentially identify these changes before symptoms develop, enabling early risk stratification without laboratory infrastructure.

Q: What does the Gates Foundation grant fund?
A: Research to validate whether AI-analysed retinal images can identify high-risk pregnancies for pre-eclampsia, anemia, and gestational diabetes in primary care settings — building a dataset to train and validate models for deployment by frontline workers using Remidio's smartphone-compatible hardware.