Press Release
oi-Oneindia Staff
Healthcare in India still runs on gaps. A patient leaves the hospital and nobody checks in again. A woman in pain reaches for a painkiller because nothing else works fast enough. A newborn’s jaundice goes unnoticed because testing means a blood draw and a lab. A mind under chronic stress has nowhere to turn but medication or vice. The most interesting healthtech founders are not chasing the next app, they are rebuilding the plumbing of care itself: the follow-up, the diagnosis, the relief, and the access.
BITS Pilani’s Conquest accelerator supports healthtech startups like Be.ing painfree for period pain, Sputnik Brain for neural interfaces in mental health, and MicroHeal with its CareOS for post-discharge patient monitoring, aiming to bridge gaps in Indian healthcare.
Backing this work is the BITS Pilani flagship start-up accelerator, Conquest, which supports a new generation of founders through a zero-cost, zero-equity model. This year’s Healthtech Pod brings together four founding teams working on period pain, post-discharge monitoring, non-invasive diagnostics, and neural interfaces, each one chipping away at a problem the healthcare system has learned to live with instead of solve.
Be.ing painfree
Founders: Nikhil Gk, Dr. Sharmistha Mondal
Founded in: 2024
Over 80 percent of women globally deal with period pain, a burden that costs the global economy more than 2 billion dollars a year in lost productivity. The options available today do not really fix anything. Painkillers and hormonal pills carry long-term risks to the body when taken every month, heat patches and TENS machines only mask the pain for a while, and symptoms like bloating and mood swings are mostly just ignored.
Be.ing painfree has built what it calls the world’s first 360-degree period care system, made entirely from natural plant extracts and designed to start relieving cramps in 15 seconds. The ecosystem includes cramp-relieving sanitary pads that offer over six hours of relief, a fast-acting topical gel, and a zero-sugar superfood blend that targets bloating and digestive discomfort.
In clinical model studies, the product outperformed standard painkillers on core pain markers, and the startup has already been named Best Startup at the IIM Bangalore Medical Leadership Summit and selected for the WTF Cohort 1. It has also reached Technology Readiness Level 9, meaning its R&D and clinical phases are complete.
Sputnik Brain
Founder: Shankar S
Founded in: 2023
HQ: Bengaluru, Karnataka
The global stress and mental health crisis is pushing people toward coping mechanisms that do more harm than good, alcohol, tobacco, and worse. Part of the problem is structural: access to the brain’s deep neural circuits still depends on invasive procedures or blunt, imprecise methods, and there is very little infrastructure built for safely working with those circuits. For conditions like treatment-resistant depression, that leaves patients with few real options.
Sputnik Brain is developing a non-surgical neural interface platform that uses proprietary wave-based stimulation to reach specific brain regions, starting with circuits tied to reward, dopamine, serotonin, and mood.
Rather than building a single therapeutic product, the team is building full-stack infrastructure for interacting with neural activity without implants or surgery, aimed initially at treatment-resistant depression patients and professionals dealing with chronic stress and burnout.
The startup has been backed by Samsung, IIT Madras, and UNDP, endorsed by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, and selected into the BrainMind neuroscience ecosystem, on top of placing in the top three at Samsung and IIT Delhi’s Solve for Tomorrow among more than 18,000 applicants.
MicroHeal
Founders: Shashank Mishra, Nupur B Pamnani
Founded in: 2022
Hospitals are good at treating patients while they are in the building and largely blind to what happens after. Of every 10 patients discharged, four to five end up back for re-consultation, and 50 to 60 percent are lost to follow-up entirely because there is no home care support in place. Most hospitals simply do not have the software or remote devices needed to track a patient’s recovery once they walk out the door, which is a real problem for complex conditions that need daily monitoring, not just medicine.
MicroHeal’s answer is CareOS, an all-in-one care operating system built to cut readmissions and help chronic and post-surgical patients recover safely at home.
It combines a clinical dashboard for doctors, a simple WhatsApp interface for patients, trained medical coordinators who guide people through scientifically tested protocols, and connected monitoring devices, including a patented stool tracker that flags changes like blood or mucus.
In a randomized controlled trial, pairing the platform with standard drug therapy cut Irritable Bowel Syndrome severity scores by 79 percent. MicroHeal has signed operational MoUs with regional healthcare entities and moved into late-stage procurement pipelines with hospital groups including Kamineni, Arete, Marengo Asia, and Dr. Dangs Lab, alongside a filed patent for its diagnostic device.
