IDG, Erasmic invest $3.5mn in Perfint

Healthcare devices firm has a lab in Mysore.

IDG Ventures India, a $150 million early-stage technology venture capital fund, and Erasmic Venture Fund have jointly invested $3.5 million in Perfint, a Chennai-headquartered healthcare devices start-up company, with its development labs in Mysore. Of the total investment, IDG Ventures has funded $3 million, while the rest has been funded by Erasmic.

Perfint's first product PIGA is a tool positioner for image-guided minimally invasive (IG-MI) procedures. This will support applications such as fine needle aspiration (FNA), biopsy and radio frequency ablation (RFA) for diagnosing cancer tumours in the lungs and abdomen.

The product which is under test deployment at five leading hospitals in India, has done about 100 clinical trials and is set for launch in January next year, according to the company.

Perfint was co-founded in October 2005 by S Nandakumar, B D Vijaya and a team of healthcare devices professionals who were previously working with GE Healthcare at its design, manufacturing and sourcing hub in India, in October 2005.

The company which has a team of about 30 persons, has so far invested about $1 million, raised internally to meet its R&D and other expenses, as it is set to launch its first product.

"We are happy to be associated with Perfint, which will be our first portfolio company in the healthcare equipment space in India. Given the expertise of the team and the disruptive nature of the products, Perfint is well-placed to be a leader in this domain," said Sudhir Sethi, Chairman and Managing Director, IDG Ventures India.

He said Perfint was well-positioned to be a $50 million company in the next 3-4 years.

Perfint aims to use the funds in establishing the products in the global market, and develop new products in area of dedicated organ imaging and imaging implementation technology.

"We will deploy the funds raised from IDG and Erasmic to accelerate our new product programmes. We will launch the products in emerging markets including India and China, and look at entering the US markets in 2009," said S Nandakumar, Co-founder and CEO of Perfint.

Perfint has filed five patents both in the US as well as in India, for some of the technologies the company has used in its first product.

Image guided interventions has been categorised as IG diagnosis (like biopsy), IG therapy (like radiation) and IG surgery.

The global market for minimally invasive image-guided interventions is presently over $3 billion, in spite of the fact that less than 15 per cent of all the surgeries are performed using IG-MI approach.

According to various estimates, the guided procedures for early stage cancer diagnosis and drug delivery are estimated to grow from about 10-15 per cent at present to about 50-60 per cent by 2010.