Our Co-Founder and CEO, Dr. Manasi Aichmueller-Ratnaparkhe and our Commercial & Partnerships Lead, Dr. Jubin Shah spent August traveling across India, visiting different parts of the country, including remote areas, to meet partners in person and strengthen PAICON’s presence in one of the world’s most diverse healthcare ecosystems.
Building on existing foundation
PAICON already holds Indian health data within its global data infrastructure. This trip built on that foundation, deepening existing partnerships and forming new ones to broaden the depth and diversity of data representation from the region. Meetings spanned healthcare partners, research institutions and data ecosystem stakeholders, with conversations focused on how data from the region can be brought into an AI-ready, multimodal infrastructure in a way that is compliant, high quality and genuinely useful for discovery.
A region central to PAICON’s mission
With one of the largest patient populations in the world, and one of the most genetically and demographically diverse, India sits at an interesting crossroads for health AI: a market where the case for better-represented data is not theoretical but immediate, and where partnerships built on the ground tend to matter more than those built on paper. It’s part of why visits like this carry weight beyond the meetings themselves.
The visit is a direct extension of PAICON’s core mission, closing the gap captured in the Remaining84 concept: the idea that 84% of the world’s population remains underrepresented in medical training data. India’s scale and diversity make it central to that mission, and continued on the ground engagement is what turns representation from an ambition into real, usable data infrastructure.
India represents exactly the kind of diverse data ecosystem we need to keep building into global health AI. This trip was about strengthening real partnerships on the ground, not just expanding on paper. - Dr. Manasi Aichmueller-Ratnaparkhe, CEO & Co-Founder
A Heidelberg connection, several thousand kilometres from Heidelberg
One of the most interesting and telling moments of the trip had nothing to do with datasets. In meeting rooms across the country, the team kept running into people who had arrived from somewhere else: a new Heidelberg connection working in a local Indian office, colleagues from Southeast Asia and America working inside local Indian companies.
India is not only diverse in itself. It is international. Its healthcare and technology sectors pull in people from across Asia, America, Africa and Europe, and send people out just as readily.
What struck us was how international India already is. You sit in a room in India and meet people from Germany and Southeast Asia working side by side with Indian teams. That is the world medicine actually serves, and it is the world our data has to reflect. - Dr. Jubin Shah, Commercial & Partnerships Lead
That is also the entire premise of the remaining84 book is that populations are not fixed to a map. People move, marry, migrate for work, and take their genetics, their environment and their disease risk with them. A model trained on one narrow population is not only unfair to the people it left out, it is increasingly inaccurate for the patients actually walking into local clinics gloablly. Health systems everywhere are treating populations that no longer resemble the datasets their tools were built on.
Representation, in other words, is accuracy. And the mobility we saw first hand in India is one of the clearest arguments for why medicine has to be built globally from the start.
More updates on these partnerships will follow as discussions progress.
