Making pregnancy and childbirth safer through accessible, affordable & technology-driven solutions – #SankalpChangemakers features Arun Agarwal, Founder and CEO, Janitri Innovations
When Every Beat Matters
Growing up in Kota, Rajasthan, Arun Agarwal witnessed something that would shape his life’s work: the tragic regularity of stillbirths and maternal deaths in his community. These weren’t distant statistics, they were neighbours, relatives, women whose lives could have been saved with better monitoring and timely intervention. The memories stayed with him through his Biomedical Engineering studies in Bangalore and beyond.
After completing his degree, Arun joined a medical device company. But he quickly realized that most of the products were designed for high-end hospitals, not the places he had seen struggling in his hometown. That disconnect gnawed at him. So, before starting up, he took time off to travel across India, part self-funded research, part obsession, visiting over 100 hospitals and labour wards. His goal wasn’t to sell anything but to listen to doctors, nurses, midwives, and families.
“We found that critical complications were being missed not because doctors lacked skill, but because they lacked real-time information,” Agarwal recalls of those early research days.
The Silent Gaps in Maternal Care
What Arun discovered on that journey was sobering. Across hospitals in Jaipur, Jodhpur, Manipur, and Kerala, the patterns repeated: absence of continuous monitoring during pregnancy and childbirth, delays in clinical decision-making when every minute mattered, and technology that was either too expensive, too complex, or simply unavailable in the very places it was needed most.
The reality was that complications weren’t going unnoticed due to lack of training, but because frontline staff didn’t have access to reliable, affordable monitoring tools. That gap became the seed of Janitri Innovations.
Building Technology That Travels
In 2016, Arun founded Janitri with a clear mission: make pregnancy and childbirth safer through accessible, affordable, and technology-driven solutions. The idea was deceptively simple—create portable foetal and maternal monitors that could work anywhere, from urban tertiary hospitals to rural primary health centres.
Janitri’s devices integrate ECG, Doppler, Tocotransducer, EMG, and Oscillometry to track foetal heart rate, maternal heart rate, uterine contractions, and vital signs. Unlike conventional CTG machines that tether patients to hospital beds, Janitri’s monitors are wireless and portable, designed for both hospital and home use.
Crucially, the hardware is paired with digital platforms (Janitri for Hospitals and Janitri for Mothers) which enable continuous monitoring, digital partographs, real-time alerts, and remote access through mobile applications. This isn’t just digitization; it’s a reimagining of how maternal care can be delivered in resource-constrained environments.
From Hospitals to Homes
Today, Janitri’s solutions are deployed across 800+ hospitals, clinics, and healthcare centres in both public and private sectors. The reach spans from large tertiary facilities like AIIMS Delhi and Manipal Hospitals, to district hospitals in Rajasthan such as Ernakulam General and Kottayam Medical College under KMSCL in Kerala, and government centres in Manipur and Maharashtra.
Beyond India, Janitri has approvals and partnerships in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, and Malaysia—taking its impact to regions with similarly high maternal and neonatal mortality rates.
The Numbers That Matter
The impact is measurable: more than 200,000 mothers monitored, 8,000+ lives saved through timely clinical interventions, and 25,000+ critical alerts generated that allowed doctors to act before it was too late. Partnerships with Villgro, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Pureland Global Venture, BIRAC, C-CAMP, Jhpiego, SELCO Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, and MSD for Mothers have been pivotal in providing validation, funding, and access to networks that help ensure the devices reach women who need them most.
Earlier this year, Janitri raised $1.4 million in a Pre-Series A round led by investor Ashish Kacholia, funds that are fuelling product development and market expansion.
Lessons in Building for Bharat
Arun Agarwal’s journey from Kota to Bangalore to hundreds of hospital wards across India shows how deeply personal motivations can spark systemic change. His work at Janitri is less about building devices and more about redesigning how care flows through fragile healthcare systems.
It offers lessons for every founder building in Bharat: listen before you build, design for the places most others ignore, and remember that scale comes not just from technology, but from trust.
Editor’s Note:
Arun Agarwal, Founder & CEO of Janitri Innovations, won the Global Impact Trailblazer Award at the Sankalp Bharat × Artha Impact Awards 2024 in Varanasi. The recognition highlighted Janitri’s role in making continuous maternal–foetal monitoring accessible across public and private health systems.
👉 Who else is building innovations for Bharat’s healthcare challenges?
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