This Sister Duo Is Using AI To Make Healthcare More Accessible Across India

At the Digital Women Awards 2025, Shyanjali and Priyanjali Datta, founders of AaroogyaAI, were recognised in the AI and Disruption category for building a technology-driven healthcare platform focused on proactive wellbeing for underserved women across India. Aaroogya AI is transforming reactive healthcare into preventive and accessible care through AI-powered solutions. 

Their flagship platform, My Healthline, combines voice-enabled AI agents with on-ground community health worker support to deliver comprehensive health screening services in regional languages, ensuring last-mile healthcare access in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities and remote regions.

While receiving the award on stage, Shyanjali shared the deeply personal inspiration behind the venture. “My mom was suffering from Essential Thrombocytosis, an autoimmune disease where the platelets increase rapidly, and there is no proper cure for that. So she started the organisation back in her college days."

Shyanjali continued, "She had no idea how to run this organisation, but today we are here, and we are serving underserved women in tier 2, tier 3 cities, and in the most remote places... We want to bridge healthcare gaps and reach every woman with the help of community healthcare workers."

Highlighting the real-world impact of their work, she also shared an incident. “When I joined the company, one of the ASHA workers didn’t know how to operate WhatsApp. Today, she is operating an AI system, helping women to track their [health needs] and connecting them to doctors.”

Shyanjali & Priyanjali Datta: Digital Women Awards 2025

STP: What Does AaroogyaAI Do?

Shyanjali & Priyanjali: AaroogyaAI Foundation transforms reactive healthcare into proactive wellbeing for underserved women through AI-powered technology.

Our flagship MyHealthLine platform combines voice-first AI agents with community health worker support to deliver comprehensive health screening in regional languages.

We've screened 135,000+ women across India, East Africa, and the United States, detecting 23,740+ early-stage conditions, including breast cancer, PCOS, and diabetes.

Our dual-AI system - agent system - AAHA (AI Agents for Health screening and workflow automation) includes a Continuous Care Delivery agent (CCDA) providing personalised health coaching to women, health insights, tracking the follow ups and nudge.

A Healthcare Worker Assistant agent empowering 4,030+ community workers with real-time diagnostic guidance.

Operating on basic smartphones with upcoming offline capability, we break literacy and connectivity barriers while reducing per-case healthcare costs by 69% and diagnosis-to-treatment time by 50%.

We've partnered with Johns Hopkins, Stanford, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, SLB, and health systems to create scalable, sustainable impact.

STP: What Kind Of Funding Did You Start With?

Shyanjali & Priyanjali: Aaroogya has raised funding from leading international and national strategic institutions, including the Millennium Alliance (backed by USAID, UK-DFID, Meta, FICCI, and the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India), Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures, The/Nudge Institute, HDFC SmartUp Grant, Cisco India CSR, PepsiCo Foundation, One Young World with Novartis, and the Mulago Foundation.

This capital has been strategically deployed not only for AI technology development but equally for community awareness campaigns, training 4,030+ healthcare workers, and delivering on-ground preventive healthcare and wellness assistance to 135,000+ women across India, East Africa, and the United States.

STP: In What Ways Do Technology And Digital Tools Contribute To The Growth, Efficiency, And Overall Success Of Your Business?

Shyanjali & Priyanjali: Technology is the foundation of our entire mission to democratize women's healthcare. Our AI-powered platform is fundamentally transforming how preventive healthcare reaches underserved communities at scale.

• Scalability Through AI: Our dual-AI agent system, AAHA, allows a single community health worker to effectively manage 2.2x more women (from 150 women per day to 330+ per day). Voice-first, multilingual AI breaks literacy and language barriers, making healthcare accessible to women who've never used smartphones or apps.
• Cost Efficiency: Digital tools have reduced per-case healthcare costs by 69% (from ₹46,500 to ₹14,500) and diagnosis-to-treatment time by 50% (47 days to 23 days). Our  Progressive Web App operates on basic smartphones with minimal data usage (<2MB), eliminating infrastructure barriers that traditionally limit healthcare access.
• Data-Driven Impact: Our Active Integrated Wellness Dashboard (AIWD) - our core intellectual property- processes complex health data across seven dimensions (hormonal, mental, nutritional, reproductive, chronic conditions, sleep, physical activity) into actionable insights.

This longitudinal health tracking enables early detection of conditions like PCOS 2-3 months earlier than traditional methods, when treatment costs are 1/3rd to 1/5th of late-stage care.

• Operational Excellence: Cloud-based microservices architecture with edge computing ensures 99.9% uptime while maintaining HIPAA/GDPR compliance. Federated learning allows our AI models to improve continuously from 135,000+ patient interactions without compromising privacy.

Real-time dashboards provide partners like SLB and government health missions with transparent impact metrics, building trust and enabling data-driven decision-making.

• Partnership Amplification: Technology enables us to white-label and customise deployments rapidly, from Pune's district-level implementation to Uganda's community health worker network of 1,700+ workers. Digital tools allow us to train, monitor, and support distributed teams across geographies without physical infrastructure investment.

Our open-source AI stack (built on TensorFlow, Hugging Face Transformers, RASA, and Whisper) positions us at the forefront of healthcare AI innovation.

Our model demonstrates how technology can create systemic healthcare transformation from 135,000 women today to our 2030 goal of 500,000+ beneficiaries globally.

STP: What Is The Future Opportunity For Your Business/Initiative?

Shyanjali & Priyanjali: India's 270+ million women face systemic healthcare barriers, with only 22 qualified professionals per 10,000 people. WHO predicts 1 in 4 households will face cancer by 2030, with women disproportionately vulnerable.

Our market opportunity spans three verticals:

Scale Targets by 2030: Train 100,000 community healthcare workers as AI-enabled care providers, reach 500,000+ women across India, Africa, and global developing markets, and deploy AAHA voice-first AI system reaching women with zero literacy barriers.

Market Size: India's digital health market is projected to reach $50 billion by 2033. Our addressable market includes 250+ million low-income women requiring preventive care, supported by $2.5 billion annual CSR spending and growing government digital health initiatives.

Partnerships: We're advancing B2G contracts with state health missions, expanding deployments (current: SLB, Cisco, HDFC, PepsiCo), and licensing our platform to NGOs across East Africa via partner - local organisations. 

We are projecting a sustainable revenue of $50 million plus in the next 5 years. 

STP: What Were Some Key Challenges You Faced While Building Your Business?

Shyanjali: I struggled with balancing my technology and product building skill building over time - all for the greater good, at the leadership level, empathy and strategic decision-making: "How will I run the organisation when I'm being too empathetic? Sometimes being too emotional leads to not making strategic decisions."

At 19, Priyanjali faced constant scepticism - "What is this utopian concept? Why are you wasting your time?" - while peers pursued traditional paths at Stanford and Harvard. Building AI-powered healthcare in 2017, before ChatGPT made AI mainstream, meant constantly proving the technology's viability to sceptical funders and partners.

Operating as a social venture in a capital-intensive sector meant bootstrapping technology development while simultaneously delivering ground-level healthcare services across multiple geographies to build a scalable Product Market Fit proof in India and East Africa. We won many reputed innovation grants. 

Convincing low-literacy communities to trust AI-powered health screening required extensive on-ground relationship-building, cultural sensitivity, and demonstrating tangible results, a process that couldn't be rushed or scaled through technology alone.

STP: Why Is It Important For Entrepreneurs To Prioritise Health And Emotional Wellbeing?

Shyanjali: As founders who've personally experienced healthcare's failures - I have severe locomotor disorder since birth.

My childhood surgeries from misdiagnosis, our mother's eight-year battle with a rare genetic condition, we understand the cost very deeply of health issues, and the fact that entrepreneurship isn't sustainable without wellbeing. 

Building Aaroogya while navigating personal health challenges taught us that resilience isn't about pushing through pain; it's about creating systems that support holistic health.

Entrepreneurs face chronic stress, decision fatigue, and isolation. Without prioritising mental and physical health, we have ourselves experienced burnout, poor judgment, and many failures. 

For women entrepreneurs, especially, societal expectations compound these pressures. My journey from questioning my emotional leadership to embracing empathy as strength shows that vulnerability and wellbeing drive better decision-making, stronger teams, and sustainable impact.

You can't pour from an empty cup; prioritising health ensures you can serve your mission for the long term.

We need many more life-changing communities like 'She The People' to have the true support system and equity in every sense. 

STP: As An Entrepreneur, What's The One Motto You Live By? 

Shyanjali & Priyanjali: Our journey with AI, as not just a technology infrastructure but a hope to see civilisation shift, started 10 years ago. It is not a buzzword or trendy tech for us. It helped us research and find possible solutions with AI-enabled genetic therapy for our mother's rare disorder of blood called Essential Thrombocytosis.

We believe AI's greatest power lies not in automation, but in augmenting human care and compassion at scale. Every line of code we write, every algorithm we train, serves one purpose: ensuring no woman is left behind because she couldn't access, afford, or understand healthcare.