For someone experiencing chest pain or breathlessness in a remote village, getting an ECG can mean travelling several kilometres to the nearest hospital. By the time the test is done, precious minutes may already have been lost.
It was this gap that led Rajat Jain and his co-founders to build Sunfox Technologies, a health-tech company in Dehradun, Uttarakhand.
They launched Spandan, a pocket-sized ECG device that connects to a smartphone. The device can record a medical-grade ECG and generate a report within minutes, without needing a conventional ECG machine, an external battery or an internet connection.
Today, more than 60,000 Spandan devices have been deployed across India, reaching over 20,000 villages across 28 states. The technology has been used to screen around five million patients, and over 2,00,000 lives have been saved.
The journey to making cardiac testing more accessible, however, began with a personal tragedy that changed the course of Rajat’s life.
The personal loss that started it
For Rajat, the idea for Sunfox began with a loss that was difficult to make sense of. At 21, he lost a close friend to a heart attack. The experience made him realise that cardiac emergencies can strike without warning and that, even when help is available, the first few minutes can make a crucial difference.
At the time, Rajat was a mechanical engineer working in the automotive field. But the loss made him look towards a problem that felt far more urgent: “How could technology make basic cardiac diagnosis available when a hospital or specialist was not close by?”
Bill Gates listening to Rajat Jain demonstrate Spandan’s prowess at ICMR HQ in Delhi. Spandan was selected among India’s best healthcare innovations supported by ICMR.
That question led him and his co-founders — Arpit Jain, Saurabh Badola, Nitin Chandola and Sabit Rawat — to start Sunfox Technologies in Dehradun in 2016. They began working on ways to make an ECG, one of the first tests doctors use when a patient shows signs of a heart problem, smaller, more affordable and easier to use.
The prototype was developed in 2017, laying the groundwork for the company’s effort to take cardiac screening into places where access to specialised care is limited.
How a smartphone became an ECG machine
An ECG, or electrocardiogram, records the tiny electrical signals the heart produces with every beat. Doctors use it to identify a heart attack, a blocked artery or an irregular heartbeat. Traditionally, it requires a large machine, a trained technician and a hospital room.
Spandan changes that. It is a portable 12-lead ECG device that connects to a smartphone, records the heart’s signals and produces a report in about two minutes.
“The advantage of using Spandan is that anyone with or without medical education can use it,” says Jain.
“Spandan devices use ECG sensors, smartphone integration, and software to record and display ECGs. It uses AI and analytics for report generation,” he explains. “Also, it does not need an external battery to work; it uses power from your smartphone to work.”
That design was a deliberate choice, made with rural India in mind.
“These features were very important for us as the device had to work in remote locations in the country without a regular source of electricity or internet connection,” says Rajat.
While the devices range in price from Rs 6,900 to Rs 75,000, depending on the model, Sunfox says a significant share of its users come from smaller towns and rural areas. Around 60 per cent of its users are from rural or semi-urban locations, with more than 20,000 devices currently active in these regions.
Co-founders of Sunfox Technologies.
Small clinics are among the buyers, as they see value in the device even at the Rs 16,000–17,000 price point, says the company. For healthcare facilities with limited access to conventional ECG machines, a portable device that can generate reports within minutes offers another way to conduct cardiac screening.
For Sunfox, the goal was to make a heart test as routine as other everyday health checks, without hurting the wallet.
Making cardiac monitoring accessible at home
The device is also being used by individuals who want to monitor their heart health between doctor visits. Sandip Deodhar, 52, an accountant assistant from Kolhapur, has been using Spandan for the past month. He is hypertensive and diabetic, and says he would often spend Rs 200–300 every other week on ECG tests recommended during his consultations.
After discovering Spandan online, he discussed it with his doctor, who agreed that he could use the device to record ECGs at home.
“For the first three-four days, I ran multiple tests to review the reports and become accustomed to the device. Now, he tells me to notify him only if there is an abnormal test; otherwise, he says there’s no need to even show him the report,” says Sandip.
The pilot: Testing in a hospital
Before Spandan could go to villages, it had to prove itself inside a hospital.
“We did the pilot in Fortis Hospital in Uttarakhand in 2018-19 along with SELCO Foundation,” shares Rajat. The team wanted answers to two questions. “We were trying to prove the validity and accuracy of our devices and wanted to know how user-friendly our devices are so that frontline health workers with minimal training could operate them.”
Then, in 2021, a study was conducted at Fortis Escorts Hospital in Dehradun under the supervision of cardiologists. The patients were first tested on the hospital’s standard ECG machine. Within five minutes, the same patients were tested on Spandan, and a cardiologist reviewed the readings independently.
Of the 153 patients enrolled, 110 were counted in the final results, and Spandan’s reading matched that of the standard machine in 108 of those 110 cases.
It was a small study, but it provided a base for what followed. Larger hospital studies came next, including a study of 2,799 patients, published in 2025 in the Anatolian Journal of Cardiology, and one in Meerut involving 184 patients with chest pain.
The company says the count is now 30 studies. “We have compared the performance of Spandan with standard ECG devices in more than 30,000 patients and have achieved a 99.7% accuracy,” says Rajat.
How Sunfox found its footing
Proving Spandan in a hospital was one step. Getting it into the field brought a different set of challenges. The first problem was money.
“The biggest challenge for us was overcoming a funding crunch while developing a health device, which conventionally requires a large investment,” says Rajat.
In the early days, the founders paid for the work themselves. “When we first started, there was no funding or grant. We self-sponsored in most part and also did side-gigs to support the research and development of our devices,” he recalls.
The second problem was testing the device where it was meant to be used. A hospital in Dehradun is very different from a village clinic, and a device built for villages had to be tried in villages.
“Secondly, we had difficulty in validating the results of our device in low-resource and rural areas because we couldn’t get too many patients there,” says Jain.
There was also the matter of trust. Sunfox was entering India’s medical device sector, which is known for high entry barriers, strict rules, heavy investment and a market crowded with imported products. Rajat says, “We faced constant doubts about whether medical technology built in India could be trusted.”
Help arrived in stages. In 2017, the first prototype was ready, and the team moved into its first office at a technology incubator at Graphic Era University in Dehradun. Government funding followed.
“Later, we received funding from the state government of Uttarakhand, from our university, and also from the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India, to conduct the pilot tests,” says Jain.
Private money came next. “In 2022, Sunfox appeared on Shark Tank India, where we got funding of Rs 1 crore,” adds Rajat. Larger funding has followed since.
In August 2024, Sunfox raised Rs 15 crore in a round led by Venture Catalysts. Inc42 also reports that the company had earlier received Rs 5 crore from USAID through its SAMRIDH Health programme and LetsVenture.
Now the product had to be tested in real-life settings. Government partnerships gave Sunfox access to rural clinics.
In September 2026, Sunfox raised $7 million (INR 66 crore) in a Series A funding round led by renowned investor Ashish Kacholia, Lashit Sanghvi, Alchemy Capital and 3one4 Capital.
The real-life challenge
Now the product had to be tested in real-life settings. Government partnerships gave Sunfox access to rural clinics.
In December 2020, the Government of India’s biotech agency BIRAC and the industry body Nasscom launched JanCare, a challenge offering health-tech startups pilot test beds at rural health centres in partnership with state governments. Sunfox took part, deploying eight devices across six CHCs and PHCs in Nagaland and two CHCs in Uttar Pradesh.
In July 2022, Sunfox also worked with the Uttarakhand government to set up a free screening camp at Sonprayag, where the Kedarnath trek begins. Trained local volunteers screened pilgrims with Spandan and sent abnormal readings over WhatsApp to a cardiologist in Dehradun. In the first month, the camp screened nearly 1,500 people and referred 59 to a local doctor.
These pilots showed that health workers without specialist training could operate the device, and larger deployments followed. SAMRIDH, the USAID-backed programme, says its support helped place 1,551 Spandan units in public and private clinics across Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir, and Delhi, screening 63,486 people.
From a prototype to 60,000 devices
What began as a self-funded lab in Dehradun has since grown into a nationwide deployment.
More than 60,000 Spandan devices are now in use, covering over 20,000 villages.
“We have deployed over 60,000 devices in the country, from Himalayan states like Uttarakhand to Nagaland in the North-east and heavily forested and remote areas in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand,” says Rajat.
State governments have come on board. “We are working with the state governments of Uttarakhand and Haryana so that any patient with symptoms of heart ailments can get access to quick diagnosis and treatment,” he says.
The two-minute turnaround is particularly significant in these settings. “The healthcare worker, whether a nurse, technician or even doctor, puts the leads on the patient and receives an ECG within 3 minutes, with a clinician-reviewed diagnosis and prescription,” Jain explains.
The results show up in the numbers. Until October 2026, “In Uttarakhand, we have worked in CHCs and PHCs on the Char Dham Yatra route and have screened more than 13100 pilgrims and identified 463 critical patients who could receive treatment on time,” he says.
In Haryana, “We have deployed our devices in more than 597 PHCs and CHCs and conducted ECGs for 60,000 people and detected 2000 critical cases since June.”
The device can also flag the most dangerous kind of heart attack early.
“We can detect the deadliest kind of heart attack, called STEMI, in less than an hour of it first occurring, saving thousands of lives,” says Jain.
The road ahead
In August 2026, Sunfox marked 10 years with the opening of an innovation hub in Dehradun. Its next goal is to take Spandan beyond India.
“We plan to expand in low- and middle-income countries, especially in Africa and South Asia, and we have already started.” According to SAMRIDH, more than 400 Spandan devices are in use across Africa.
The mission has not changed since the day Jain lost his friend. “Most heart attacks in India are preventable if diagnosed early,” he says.
“Our vision is to take this portable ECG technology and make it so ubiquitous that everyone has access to it, just as they do for thermometers and BP machines.” And if the numbers are anything to go by, Sunfox is surely on its way to success.
