Company leader
Prashant Warier
Co-Founder and CEO
Qure.ai
Prashant Warier is co-founder and chief executive of Qure.ai, which reads chest X-rays and emergency scans so a hospital can flag tuberculosis, stroke, or trauma without waiting on a scarce radiologist.
Growing Up in Bhilai, India
He was born and raised in Bhilai, a steel town in central India that was then in Madhya Pradesh and is now in Chhattisgarh. His father was an engineer at a steel plant and his mother was a schoolteacher. In class 11 he learned Pascal and BASIC in a school lab. When he was 17, doctors misdiagnosed his father with a malignant spinal cord tumor and performed an unnecessary surgery that left him unable to walk. "This experience highlighted the critical need for improved diagnostic accuracy and accessibility," he said. In 1997 he entered the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi for manufacturing science and engineering, after that year's entrance exam was held twice because the paper leaked.
A PhD on Trucking Networks
In 2001 he went to Georgia Tech, finished a master's in two semesters, and stayed for a PhD on integer programming for trucking networks. He was a senior research scientist at SAP for more than four years. In 2011 he returned to India, joined Fractal Analytics on retail work, and in 2012 started Imagna Analytics, an advertising-technology firm. Fractal acquired it, and in 2015 he went back as chief data scientist.
In early 2016 he started Qure.ai inside Fractal with Pooja Rao, a physician-scientist who had been doing neuroscience data work in Amsterdam. The company applies deep learning to radiology and pathology images. By April 2020 the tools were in use in more than 20 countries for tuberculosis screening, trauma and stroke triage, and automated chest X-ray reports.