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Startup Deep Dive : CARPL.ai — how a Delhi company became the app store for radiology AI

More than 700 radiology AI tools have cleared the United States FDA, and yet in most hospitals not one of them touches a live scan. CARPL.ai, a New Delhi company that writes none of those algorithms itself, has turned that gap into a business: in July 2026 it raised a $10 million (about ₹96 crore) Series A led by the World Bank’s investment arm, the International Finance Corporation, taking its disclosed funding to $16 million.

The pitch is almost boring in its simplicity. Radiology AI is everywhere on paper and almost nowhere in the scan room, because every algorithm speaks a different technical language and every hospital’s imaging plumbing is its own tangle. CARPL sells the layer in between, a single platform through which a hospital can discover, test on its own data, deploy and monitor more than 300 AI applications from over 100 vendors. This is the story of how a family radiology business in Delhi turned into a piece of global healthcare infrastructure, what the public record actually shows about its size, and where the model could still break.

Quick facts

Company CARPL.ai (CARPL.AI Private Limited, CIN U73100DL2018PTC333492)
Founded Incorporated 2018 in Delhi; platform publicly launched 2021 (Inc42, YourStory)
Founder(s) Dr Vidur Mahajan (founder and CEO); leadership includes Dr Vasanth Venugopal (CMO), Rohit Takhar (CTO), Dhruv Sahai (COO)
Businesses Vendor-neutral marketplace and enterprise platform to test, deploy and monitor radiology and medical-imaging AI
Latest FY revenue ₹10.9 crore operating revenue for the year ended 31 March 2024 (Tracxn)
Latest FY profit/loss Loss-making; Tofler reports FY24 net profit down 201% and EBITDA down 194% year on year (absolute figure not public)
Listed Private
Last valuation Not disclosed; total disclosed funding $16 million (about ₹153.6 crore) as of July 2026
Key shareholders / CEO Stellaris Venture Partners, International Finance Corporation (IFC); CEO Dr Vidur Mahajan

What CARPL.ai actually does

CARPL.ai runs a vendor-neutral platform that lets hospitals, imaging chains and radiology groups find, validate, deploy and monitor artificial-intelligence tools for medical imaging through a single interface. Think of it as an operating system and app store sitting between the hospital’s scanners and the many companies that build AI to read those scans. As of the July 2026 fundraise announcement, the company said the platform carried more than 300 radiology AI applications from over 100 AI partners. The problem it targets is documented across the sector:

The origin: from Mahajan Imaging to a marketplace

CARPL did not begin as a startup pitch; it began as an internal tool. Its name is a nod to the CARING (Center for Advanced Research in Imaging, Neurosciences and Genomics) Analytics Platform, the software used inside the founder’s family radiology business to validate and deploy AI on real patient scans. Dr Vidur Mahajan, a physician with an MBA from the Wharton School and more than a decade in diagnostics, ran Mahajan Imaging, a Delhi radiology chain, where he grew revenue tenfold to a company-stated $20 million over ten years, according to TechCrunch and HITConsultant.

The founding insight came from watching that AI adoption fail from the inside. Dr Mahajan and his father, the radiologist Dr Harsh Mahajan, kept trying to put algorithms into live clinical use and kept hitting the same wall: the tools worked in demos but were painful to test, integrate and trust at scale. The realisation was that the bottleneck was not the AI itself but everything around it, and that this middle layer could be a product other hospitals would pay for. CARPL was spun out to sell that layer to the world rather than keep it in one imaging chain. The platform launched publicly in 2021, with the legal entity dating to 2018.

The hard part: selling software nobody had a budget for

The gap between “obviously useful” and “someone will pay for it” is where most health-tech companies die, and CARPL’s early years sat squarely in that gap. Two structural problems shaped the difficult stretch, both visible in the public record.

First, there was no established line item for what CARPL sells. Hospitals buy scanners, PACS systems and reporting software; a marketplace-and-monitoring layer for third-party AI was a category that barely existed when the company launched in 2021. Selling it meant educating buyers on a problem many did not yet feel acutely, in a market where, as TechCrunch noted in February 2024, more than 200 companies were building radiology AI and over 700 tools had FDA clearance but real-world use stayed low. CARPL was, in effect, betting that the flood of algorithms would force hospitals to want a control layer before that demand fully arrived.

Second, the numbers stayed small. Tracxn’s filing-based data shows operating revenue of just ₹10.9 crore for the year ended 31 March 2024, roughly a decade after the underlying software work began and three years after the public launch. Tofler’s summary of the same year shows revenue slipping about 2.9% and the bottom line deteriorating sharply, with net profit down 201% and EBITDA down 194% against the prior year. For a company positioning itself as global infrastructure, that is a reminder that the enterprise healthcare sales cycle is long, and that scale in “number of AI apps” had not yet translated into scale in rupees.

The turning point: the IFC round

The clearest inflection in CARPL’s public story is the July 2026 Series A. In that round the company raised $10 million, about ₹96 crore, led by the International Finance Corporation, the private-sector arm of the World Bank Group, with existing backer Stellaris Venture Partners participating. Two things make it a genuine turning point rather than just a bigger cheque.

On one side of the event sits a company that, as recently as February 2024, described itself as post-revenue with roughly 100 apps from about 50 developers and a seed round of $6 million. On the other side, by July 2026, sits a platform stating more than 300 applications from over 100 partners, used by four of the world’s five largest private radiology groups, with government deployments across Brazil, India, Singapore, Spain and the UAE. The IFC’s involvement matters beyond the money: a World Bank institution backing an Indian deep-tech company signals that the buyers CARPL wants, public health systems and large enterprises in emerging and developed markets, are now in reach. The round roughly tripled the app count on the platform versus two years earlier and doubled disclosed funding to $16 million.

The money behind it

What each backer changed is worth naming. Stellaris seeded the company and stayed in through the Series A, providing continuity. The IFC brought both capital and the institutional credibility of a World Bank body, aligned with CARPL’s stated push into public health systems and emerging markets.

How it makes money

CARPL is a marketplace, so its economics sit on top of other companies’ products rather than its own algorithms. The public description of the model breaks down like this:

The numbers

CARPL is a private, early-stage deep-tech company, and its granular multi-year financials are not fully public; some line items sit behind paid filing databases. The figures below are limited to what could be verified from filing-based sources this month, in ₹ crore, with the year each covers.

Metric Figure Source / period
Operating revenue, FY24 ₹10.9 crore Tracxn, year ended 31 March 2024
Revenue change, FY24 vs FY23 about -2.9% Tofler, FY24
Net profit change, FY24 vs FY23 about -201% (deepening loss) Tofler, FY24
EBITDA change, FY24 vs FY23 about -194% Tofler, FY24
Total disclosed funding $16 million (about ₹153.6 crore) Crunchbase, as of July 2026

The picture the data supports is consistent: revenue was roughly flat and modest in FY24 while losses widened, which is normal for a company spending ahead of a long enterprise sales cycle, but it also means the ₹96 crore Series A is funding a business that had not yet found revenue scale as of its last filed year. Where FY25 and FY23 absolute figures could not be verified from open sources, they have been left out rather than estimated.

Where the money comes from

The revealing split for CARPL is geographic and by customer type rather than by product line, and it runs against the usual assumption about an Indian startup.

The surprise, then, is that a New Delhi company’s marketplace is anchored by some of the largest radiology enterprises outside India, and by public health systems, rather than by the domestic private hospital market.

The risks

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from CARPL is about where to stand in a gold rush. When hundreds of companies were racing to build radiology algorithms and over 700 had cleared the FDA, the durable position was not to build the 701st but to own the layer that lets a hospital use any of them safely. CARPL took an internal tool built to solve its own family business’s problem, recognised that the same problem existed everywhere, and sold the plumbing instead of the product. The unfinished part of the story is just as instructive: reach measured in apps and logos is not the same as revenue, and a ₹96 crore Series A backed by the World Bank’s IFC buys time to close that gap, not proof that it is closed. For anyone building infrastructure, the discipline is to keep asking whether supply-side scale is actually turning into paid, repeated use.

Frequently asked questions

What does CARPL.ai do?

CARPL.ai runs a vendor-neutral platform that lets hospitals and radiology groups discover, test, deploy and monitor medical-imaging AI tools through one interface. As of July 2026 it hosted more than 300 radiology AI applications from over 100 partners, and it builds none of those algorithms itself.

Who founded CARPL.ai and when?

It was founded by Dr Vidur Mahajan, a physician with a Wharton MBA who previously ran the family radiology chain Mahajan Imaging. The legal entity dates to 2018 and the platform launched publicly in 2021. The leadership team includes Dr Vasanth Venugopal (CMO), Rohit Takhar (CTO) and Dhruv Sahai (COO).

How much funding has CARPL.ai raised?

Disclosed funding stood at $16 million (about ₹153.6 crore) as of July 2026: a $6 million seed round in February 2024 led by Stellaris Venture Partners, and a $10 million (about ₹96 crore) Series A in July 2026 led by the International Finance Corporation, with Stellaris participating. The valuation was not disclosed.

Is CARPL.ai profitable?

No. It reported operating revenue of ₹10.9 crore for the year ended 31 March 2024 (Tracxn), and Tofler’s data shows losses widened that year, with net profit and EBITDA both falling sharply. It remains a private, loss-making company investing ahead of revenue.

Who are CARPL.ai’s customers?

The company says it is used by four of the world’s five largest private radiology groups, with reported clients including RadNet, I-MED, Fleury, Medica and Massachusetts General Hospital, plus government and public-health deployments in Brazil, India, Singapore, Spain and the UAE.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

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