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Startup Deep Dive : Janitri – a Rs 1 crore Shark Tank bet on cutting India’s maternal deaths with cheaper monitors

The Invincible India

In the second season of Shark Tank India, a former patent analyst from Alwar walked away with ₹1 crore for handing over just 2.5% of his company, a deal that valued his maternal-health device maker at ₹40 crore (about $4.2 million). The contradiction sitting underneath that number is the interesting part: this was a hardware business that, by its own account, had spent years surviving on grants rather than sales, and whose filed operating revenue in the year ended 31 March 2025 was still only ₹5.14 crore, as per data compiled by Tracxn and Inc42 from its MCA filings.

That gap between valuation and revenue is the whole story of Janitri Innovations Private Limited. The Bengaluru company builds low-cost devices to watch over mothers and unborn babies during labour, a stretch of a few hours where India loses a large share of the women and newborns it loses at all. Janitri is not selling a mass-market gadget. It is trying to make continuous fetal and maternal monitoring cheap enough for a district hospital that has one nurse for a ward full of women in labour. This deep dive traces how a grant-funded idea became a product line in hundreds of hospitals, what the public record actually shows about its money, and where the risks sit.

Quick facts

Company Janitri Innovations Private Limited (CIN U85100RJ2016PTC049455)
Founded Incorporated 1 March 2016 (per MCA records via Tofler / TheCompanyCheck)
Founder Arun Agarwal (founder-CEO); other directors on record include Lalit Garg and nominee director Ziyu Wang (Tofler)
Businesses Maternal, fetal and newborn monitoring devices and software (Keyar patch, Daksh app, Navam wearable)
Latest FY revenue ₹5.14 crore for FY25 (year ended 31 March 2025), per Tracxn/Inc42 MCA-derived data; the company’s June 2025 fundraise materials stated a higher ₹8.5 crore (see The numbers)
Latest FY profit/loss Not separately disclosed in the free public record; the company remained grant- and equity-funded through FY25 (see The numbers)
Listed Private (unlisted)
Last valuation Reported at $6.17 million around its May 2023 seed round (Inc42/PitchBook); Tracxn lists ₹99.2 crore, about $11.9 million, as of 5 November 2024
Key shareholders Founder Arun Agarwal; investors include Ashish Kacholia, O2 Angels Network and Elevate 100; grants from BIRAC and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

What Janitri does

Janitri sells continuous monitoring tools for the hours around childbirth, aimed mainly at hospitals rather than individual consumers. Its stated pitch is to bring the kind of round-the-clock fetal and maternal surveillance found in well-staffed private wards to under-resourced government and small private hospitals at a fraction of the usual equipment cost.

The origin

Arun Agarwal grew up in Alwar, Rajasthan, and studied at Vellore Institute of Technology. His first job out of college was as a patent analyst, work that, by his own telling in profiles such as AIM2Flourish and eChai Ventures, taught him how much of a hardware company’s value sits in its intellectual property before it teaches him anything about childbirth. What pulled him toward maternal health was the plain arithmetic of Indian obstetrics: most deaths of mothers and newborns cluster in a narrow window during and just after labour, and the difference between a save and a loss is often whether anyone was watching the right vital sign at the right minute.

The insight Janitri was built on was not a new sensor. Cardiotocography machines that read fetal and maternal signals have existed for decades. The insight was about cost and place. A conventional fetal monitor is expensive, tethered and scarce, so in a busy district hospital one machine might rotate across many labouring women, or there might be none at all. Agarwal’s bet, formed while the company was incorporated in 2016, was that a cheap, wearable patch feeding a phone app could put continuous monitoring next to every bed, and that hospitals which could never afford a wall of machines would pay for something a tenth of the price.

The struggle years

Medtech hardware is a slow, unforgiving business, and Janitri’s early record shows it. The company was incorporated in March 2016, but by its own account it did not begin selling products until around March 2021, roughly five years spent in development, validation and clinical groundwork before revenue. In a market that celebrates software startups shipping in months, a half-decade with no product to sell is a long time to stay alive.

How it stayed alive is telling. Rather than raising a large early venture round, Janitri leaned on grants. Coverage by The Better India and Business Insider records that the company survived on support from the Governments of India, Karnataka and Canada, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the incubator Villgro and BIRAC, the Indian government’s biotech grant body. Grant money buys time but not scale; it kept the lights on through years when a purely commercial startup with the same revenue would likely have folded. The second, quieter struggle was distribution: convincing cash-strapped public hospitals and cautious private ones to trust an unbranded Indian device with something as high-stakes as a baby’s heartbeat is a sale measured in years, not quarters, and it is the reason the revenue line stayed small long after the product worked.

The turning point

The event that changed Janitri’s public trajectory aired on Shark Tank India’s second season in early 2023. Arun Agarwal pitched the device and accepted an offer from Namita Thapar of ₹1 crore for 2.5% equity, an implied valuation of ₹40 crore. As multiple recaps of the episode note, the offer carried a condition: an additional 2.5% equity would go to the investor side if the company failed to reach ₹20 crore in revenue within a year, a clawback that tells you how far the ask sat ahead of the actuals.

The numbers on either side of that moment frame the whole business. Before the show, this was a grant-dependent company that had only been selling for about two years. After it, Janitri had a nationally televised endorsement, a marquee shark on the cap table and a valuation marker of ₹40 crore, even though its filed revenue would still be in the low single-digit crores two full years later, at ₹5.14 crore for FY25. Television did not fix the unit economics; it fixed the company’s ability to get meetings, raise money and be trusted by hospitals, which for a hardware business selling into the public sector is most of the battle.

The money behind it

Janitri’s capital history is a mix of dilutive rounds and non-dilutive grants, spread across nearly a decade. The dilutive rounds on the public record are modest by venture standards:

Total raised is the one figure where sources diverge, so both are given here: Inc42 puts cumulative equity funding at about $2.5 million across three disclosed rounds as of June 2025, while Tracxn reports a larger $3.95 million across 10 rounds from 36 investors, a difference that likely reflects how each counts small angel tickets and grants. On valuation, the two public markers also differ by period: roughly $6.17 million around the May 2023 seed (Inc42/PitchBook) and ₹99.2 crore, about $11.9 million, as of 5 November 2024 per Tracxn. Neither is a company-confirmed post-money for the 2025 round.

How it makes money

Janitri’s model is hardware plus recurring software, sold business-to-business into hospitals, with a longer-term consumer ambition. The mechanics, as pieced together from company statements and reporting:

The numbers

Janitri is small and its filings are lightly disclosed, so the revenue picture is best read as a range rather than a precise ledger. The figures below carry their sources because two of them disagree.

Financial year Revenue (₹ crore) Source
FY24 (ended 31 Mar 2024) In the ₹1–10 crore band (exact figure not free-disclosed) Tracxn / Tofler banded data
FY25 (ended 31 Mar 2025) ₹5.14 crore (MCA-derived) Tracxn / Inc42
FY25 (ended 31 Mar 2025) ₹8.5 crore (company/fundraise-stated, described as ~2x YoY) tal64 syndicate note, June 2025

Where the money comes from

Janitri’s revenue and reach are concentrated in institutional deployments, with growing international spread. The company-stated splits below are attributed as such, because most come from its own materials rather than filings.

The risks

The takeaway

Janitri is a useful correction to the idea that a Shark Tank deal is a finish line. The televised ₹40 crore valuation and Namita Thapar’s cheque did not change the fact that this is a hard, slow, low-margin hardware business selling to some of the most budget-constrained buyers in the country. What the deal changed was trust and access, and for a company whose product touches a baby’s life, trust is the scarce input. The transferable lesson is that in deep-tech and medtech, patient non-dilutive capital, grants, incubators and government programmes, can be the difference between reaching a product at all, but it only buys the right to start the real work: turning a device that works into a business that pays for itself. On the public record so far, Janitri has done the first and is still visibly in the middle of the second.

Frequently asked questions

What does Janitri make?

Janitri makes low-cost maternal, fetal and newborn monitoring products, mainly for hospitals: the Keyar abdominal patch that tracks fetal and maternal heart rate and labour contractions, the Daksh monitoring app, and a wrist-worn wearable called Navam that has been described as a prototype and an at-home monitoring direction.

Who founded Janitri and when?

Janitri Innovations Private Limited was incorporated on 1 March 2016 (MCA records via Tofler). It was founded by Arun Agarwal, an engineer from Alwar, Rajasthan, and Vellore Institute of Technology alumnus who started his career as a patent analyst.

What was Janitri’s Shark Tank India deal?

On Shark Tank India Season 2 (2023), founder Arun Agarwal accepted ₹1 crore for 2.5% equity from Namita Thapar, an implied valuation of ₹40 crore, reportedly with a condition adding a further 2.5% equity if the company missed ₹20 crore in revenue within a year.

How much money has Janitri raised?

Sources differ: Inc42 puts disclosed equity funding at about $2.5 million across three rounds as of June 2025 (including a $1.1 million seed in May 2023 and a $1.4 million pre-Series A in June 2025), while Tracxn reports $3.95 million across 10 rounds. It has also received grants from the Gates Foundation, BIRAC, Villgro and government programmes.

What is Janitri’s revenue?

For FY25 (year ended 31 March 2025), MCA-derived data compiled by Tracxn and Inc42 shows revenue of ₹5.14 crore. The company’s own June 2025 fundraise materials stated a higher ₹8.5 crore for the same period; the audited filing should be treated as the reference and the difference may reflect definition or timing.

Sources

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

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