Detecting heart attacks beyond hospitals: Sunfox is making ECGs more accessible

It’s a common fact that cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in India. As per the Indian Heart Association, India accounts for nearly 60% of the world’s heart disease burden.

What’s more concerning is that most heart attacks happen outside of hospitals, says Rajat Jain, CEO, Sunfox Technologies, a Dehradun-based medtech firm. “While ECG technology has existed for more than 100 years, it has primarily designed to be used by doctors inside hospitals,” he says. For Jain, making heart monitoring more accessible is deeply personal: he lost a college friend to a heart attack at a very young age.

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“Because I was born and raised in a small village, I could connect the dots and realise that when someone has a heart attack in a remote part of the country, they often never make it to the hospital on time due to many obvious challenges. I wanted to figure out how we could help people diagnose if something is wrong before they slip into a very serious condition,” says Jain, a former engineer who used to build racing cars.

So, right after college, Jain and his co-founding team decided to make a smartphone-native device that uses a smartphone to detect heart attacks. In 2016, five co-founders—Jain, his brother Arpit Jain (Director), and his friends Sabit Rawat (Marketing/Business Lead), Nitin Chandola (Hardware Lead), and Saurabh Badola (Software Lead)—started Sunfox Technologies.

The company spent about six years building the technology before taking the product ‘Spandan’ to the real world, as “medical devices are one of the toughest domains from a start-up point of view,” Jain says. This involved developing technology, going through clinical assessments, research frameworks, regulations, and certifications, he adds.

In January 2022, Sunfox launched the product for the first time on Shark Tank India Season 1, securing an all-5-Shark deal of Rs 1 crore for 6% equity.

“We wanted to turn it into a point-of-care equipment so that there is no doctor dependency required to perform the test. Just as people use a thermometer, a blood pressure monitor, or an oximeter at home today, we wanted to offer something similar to monitor cardiac conditions at home,” Jain says.

Handy and hearty

Spandan is a smartphone-powered, portable, clinical-grade 12-lead ECG device. It comes in various models starting from Rs 6,999 to Rs 64,999. It offers 99.7% trace accuracy and is CDSCO-approved and peer-reviewed in medical journals. It weighs about 14.5 grams. It does not require an internal battery and can be charged with an Android USB OTG.

Spandan can detect more than 39 cardiac anomalies, including 21+ arrhythmias, myocardial infarction (MI) regions, ischaemia, and conduction blocks.

“We are essentially bringing a hospital-grade device into an accessible format so that a non-medical person can use it at home. In terms of form factor, it mimics the wired headphones we used to use, sharing the same size and configuration. You plug one side into your phone and connect the other side to your chest, turning your smartphone into a hospital-grade ECG machine,” he says.

Jain says that the product is very cost-effective, as a standard ECG machine costs around Rs 100,000. “We also have a model for physicians so that they can offer cardiac diagnostic and monitoring services directly at their clinics without needing to refer patients to higher facilities,” he adds.

Along with Sunfox’s Spandan, there are many other Made-in-India portable ECG brands, including Maestros, Agatsa One, and Kavitul Technologies, that are now present in the market. According to data from Grand View Research, the portable and mobile ECG market in India, valued at nearly $68.6 million in 2023, is expected to reach $4.18 billion by 2030.

Sunfox has sold more than 60,000 devices in the past four years and is working with various state governments and has helped reduce mortality significantly. “For instance, the Government of Haryana has reported a 20% reduction in overall cardiac mortality across the state. We run 600 centers for them in the state and have detected over 2,100 critical patients in the last five months alone. Similarly, along the Char Dham route in Uttarakhand, including Kedarnath and Badrinath, we have detected over 450 heart attacks in the past six months,” Jain says.

Raghvendra Deshmukh, a general surgeon from Latur, Maharashtra, shared his experience of using Spandan. “Around 3-4 of my patients who had Acute Myocardial Infarction (also known as heart attack) were diagnosed quickly with the help of this device. It is portable, and I really like the idea that it connects to my phone, which makes it fast to send the results to my anaesthetists and others. We need more of these technologies; the smaller and more portable it gets, the better it is. You can take it anywhere,” Deshmukh says.

Building trust

Building a medical device can not only be tricky but comes with various challenges, especially in terms of regulations, hence the 6-year research and development phase for Sunfox.

The company has obtained regulatory certifications in India, including BIS, CDSCO, and ISO 13485 as well as certifications in parts of Africa and the Middle East, while the US and European approvals are in the pipeline. “Beyond certifications, doctors will not buy or recommend a product immediately unless they trust its performance and data,” Jain says.

Further, dealing with doctors and patients requires meeting a strict set of requirements to earn their buy-in. “As a medical device maker, the toughest challenge is building trust, carrying enough credibility, and securing full conviction from professionals on what you are doing,” he says.

Sunfox clocked a revenue of Rs 5.2 crore in FY23, Rs 4.6 crore in FY24, and Rs 8.1 crore in FY25, as per Tracxn. The company is eyeing Rs 40 crore in revenue this year and aiming to hit about Rs 100 crore over the next two years. “To achieve that target, we are working toward deploying roughly 100,000 units a year,” he says.