NSRCEL Start-up: Prantae Solutions

Towards early detection and effective cure

Prantae Solutions Private Limited (One Person Company) is a healthcare device and diagnostic start-up from Bhubaneswar, Odisha. The Founder, Dr. Sumona Karjee Mishra, shares that Prantae was set up on 1st June 2015 and has been placed among the top 30 medical device and diagnostic manufacturers of India and adjudged the only one from Eastern India by Biospectrum India 2020-2021. 

Describing her entrepreneurial journey further, she adds: “The firm has also been winning the CII-IPR award for the last four years. We have strong R&D activity with a DSIR recognized R&D facility. Prantae has been awarded various grants from DBT-BIRAC, DST, MeitY, Tata Trust, Millennium Alliance and Grand Challenge Exploration-India for product development. As part of our contribution towards the fight against COVID 19, Prantae developed three innovative diagnostic solutions and two of them were ICMR validated for SARS-CoV2 detection.”

She gives a lot of credit for her success to her team. “We have a great team of 12 young engineers and two scientists. Prantae is growing with the vision to decentralize diagnostics to empower patients with self-health monitoring devices as well as point of care devices for resource limited settings. We have developed world’s first kidney health monitoring device for self-health monitoring and were awarded the TiE-Delhi WiNer award for the same.”

Dr. Sumona Karjee Mishra says she founded the company to address the gap in healthcare and that she made her transition from academia to entrepreneurship because of a personal crisis that occurred due to lack of early diagnosis. She is an alumnus of Delhi University and pursued her PhD from JNU, New Delhi. To understand entrepreneurship better, she completed the EDP program at Judge Business School, Cambridge University and then enrolled herself for the Goldman Sachs NSRCEL 10K Women Program. 

Dr. Mishra says that the opportunity of pursuing the 10K Women Program came to her at a very crucial juncture of her entrepreneurial journey. “We had already done innovation as well as product development and wanted to make a market entry for one of our flagship projects. At that point, the understanding required for customer segmentation, market entry strategy, product market fit and financial calculations were very important. The inputs and learnings I received from the program, made my journey from product development to market, especially being innovative, very smooth. The one-to-one mentoring has been very helpful and cleared my doubts about regulatory and market penetration.”