IN SHORT: Cape Town-based AI Diagnostics has raised R85 million ($5.2 million) in a pre-Series A round to scale its AI-powered Ostium digital stethoscope, which screens for tuberculosis by analysing lung sounds in real time without needing X-rays or specialist equipment. The round was led by The Steele Foundation for Hope, with the Global Innovation Fund, iFSP Group, Africa Health Ventures and Savant also participating.
South African medtech startup AI Diagnostics has closed a $5.2 million pre-Series A round to accelerate deployment of its AI-powered tuberculosis screening technology across Africa and into Asia, using a digital stethoscope that puts frontline health workers in communities where radiology infrastructure and specialist clinicians are scarce.
Founded in 2020 and based in Cape Town, AI Diagnostics develops point-of-care screening tools designed for the exact conditions that define African healthcare delivery: limited equipment, under-resourced facilities and nurses doing the work of doctors.
- The company’s flagship product is the Ostium digital stethoscope paired with its AI.TB software model, which analyses lung sounds in real time to flag potential tuberculosis cases. When the model detects signals associated with TB, it triggers immediate referral for confirmatory testing. The system is built for nurses, pharmacists and community health workers, not specialist clinicians.
- The round was led by The Steele Foundation for Hope, which contributed $3.1 million. Participating investors include iFSP Group, the Global Innovation Fund, and returning backers Africa Health Ventures and Savant. The Global Innovation Fund’s managing director of investments noted that South Africa is becoming a hub for globally relevant health innovation built from within the continent.
- AI Diagnostics holds approval from the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (SAHPRA) and has already screened more than 1,000 patients in South Africa. The company is running clinical studies across more than 10 countries in Africa and Asia, building the lung sound training database it needs to validate the model across diverse patient populations.
- South Africa carries one of the world’s highest tuberculosis burdens. The World Health Organization’s 2025 Global TB Report estimated approximately 249,000 new cases and 54,000 deaths from TB in South Africa in 2024. More than one in five cases globally remains undiagnosed or unreported, a gap that point-of-care screening tools like Ostium are designed to close.
- The funding will support clinical research and AI model validation, regulatory expansion across additional markets, and the operational infrastructure needed to manufacture and deploy the stethoscope at scale.
- The company’s CEO Braden van Breda noted that TB has historically been underfunded relative to its disease burden. The round signals that investors increasingly see global health not as philanthropy but as a viable, scalable commercial opportunity.
- AI Diagnostics is already looking beyond TB. The acoustic AI platform can be adapted to screen for cardiovascular and respiratory conditions, positioning the digital stethoscope as a multi-application diagnostic tool rather than a single-disease solution.
The round was reported by Disrupt Africa on April 17 and confirmed by Impact Alpha on April 19, making it one of the most closely covered African healthtech raises of the month.
The Bigger Picture: Tuberculosis kills more people in Africa than almost any other infectious disease, and the detection gap is a direct consequence of infrastructure poverty: not enough X-ray machines, not enough radiologists, not enough specialist clinicians in the communities most at risk. AI Diagnostics solves the problem from the other direction. If you put AI in a stethoscope that any nurse can use, you do not need the infrastructure. Africa’s medtech moment is arriving precisely because the continent’s constraints are forcing founders to build solutions that are tougher, cheaper and more deployable than anything designed for a well-resourced health system. Those solutions travel globally. That is the commercial thesis.
Source: Disrupt Africa / Impact Alpha
