Why We Invested in Cent
Saving lives, one scan at a time.
Prateek Mehta · October 27, 2026
Many Indians who have a heart attack this year will have had their annual bloodwork done. The report probably came back fine! Vitamin D low, cholesterol a little high. Suggested intervention — take a tablet, go easy on the oil. Meanwhile the undetected threat was there, waiting to introduce itself. That would usually happen in an emergency room, at a stage when not much can be done.
In India, heart disease, cancer and metabolic diseases are usually detected at a point at which they are hard to manage or mitigate, and expensive to treat.
Shashank ND, Arpit Garg and Anshul Khandelwal started Cent to move that moment earlier, into the years when there is still a lot that can be done. For Shashank, the reason is personal. In 2024 he lost three people close to him to stage four cancer. None of them had symptoms until it was too late.
Cent is not disrupting diagnostics. India has plenty of labs, plenty of scanners, and some of the best doctors in the world! What Cent is going after is the long, and entirely avoidable, gap between feeling fine and finding out that all is not, in fact, fine!
Here is how that works. A member — not a patient, and that distinction is important — walks into a Cent centre in Bengaluru, Mumbai or Delhi. Two hours later they have had a full-body MRI, a low-dose CT, a DEXA scan, an ECG, an echo and more than a hundred biomarkers, all under one protocol. Cent's AI puts every result into one picture of the body. Specialist doctors review each finding. The member leaves with a plan, and a team that follows up through the year.
Plenty of places will sell you a scan. Nobody had brought imaging, blood work and follow-up together for people who are not yet patients.
The timing matters. A generation of Indians is living longer than their parents did, and earning enough to care about how those years go. The goal is no longer just adding years to life. It is adding life to years! Staying sharp, mobile and out of the hospital through your forties, fifties and beyond, instead of managing a diagnosis that came too late. The healthcare system we inherited was built to treat illness, and it does that very well. It was never built to look for illness in someone who feels healthy. The demand, the technology and the gap have all shown up at the same time.
We met Shashank and the team at SPC India in 2025, while Cent was still taking shape. The first centre had not opened yet. We wrote the first check then, because it was clear right then what this team was and how big their vision was.
That September I went through the full Cent protocol myself. The machines were impressive, but the experience is what stayed with me! I walked away knowing that I have Stage I fatty liver — something my Marwari genes might have gifted me, but that I wouldn't have suspected given my active lifestyle!
Shashank built Practo for 18 years, and is now bringing his wisdom and commitment to healthcare to a new category!
We talk about startups that can impact lives. But there are few that actually save lives.
The hard part is ahead. Doing this at scale, without losing the care. And we are proud to be partners with the team making that possible, at a moment this country needs it!