A Cape Town Startup Just Raised $5.2 Million to Catch Tuberculosis Before It Kills You
South Africa has a tuberculosis problem that the numbers alone cannot fully explain. In 2024, an estimated 249,000 people fell ill with TB in the country. Around 54,000 died. Those figures come from the WHO’s 2025 World TB Report, and they place South Africa consistently among the countries with the highest TB burden on the planet.
What makes this particularly difficult to solve is not just the scale. It is the silence. A national TB prevalence survey found that 58 per cent of people who tested positive for TB reported no symptoms at all. That means the standard approach to screening — wait for someone to feel sick, then test them — misses the majority of cases. By the time most patients are diagnosed, the disease has already spread.
Cape Town-based AI Diagnostics was founded in 2020 with a specific answer to that problem. The company has now raised ZAR 85 million, roughly $5.2 million, in a pre-Series A round to scale that answer across Africa and beyond.
What The Ostium Stethoscope Actually Does
The product at the centre of AI Diagnostics’ work is the Ostium, an AI-powered digital stethoscope paired with the company’s proprietary AI TB software model. The device analyses lung sounds in real time and flags individuals whose patterns are associated with tuberculosis, allowing an immediate referral for confirmatory testing.
The key design decision is who it is built for. The Ostium does not require specialist equipment, radiology infrastructure, or a trained clinician to operate. It is designed for frontline healthcare workers — nurses, pharmacists, community health workers — the people who are already the first point of contact in communities where clinics are understaffed and diagnostic tools are scarce.
That matters because the gap in TB detection is not primarily a knowledge gap. It is a geography and resource gap. The communities carrying the highest disease burden are often the furthest from the infrastructure needed to diagnose it. AI Diagnostics built the Ostium for that reality rather than around it.
The Round And Who Backed It
The pre-Series A was led by The Steele Foundation for Hope, with participation from iFSP Group and the Global Innovation Fund. Follow-on investment came from early backers Africa Health Ventures and Savant.
The funding will go towards clinical research and validation, continued development of the hardware and AI model, and building the operational infrastructure needed to scale across South Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. AI Diagnostics already holds approval from the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority and has screened more than 1,000 patients domestically. Clinical research is currently active in over 10 countries across Africa and Asia.
Joe Exner, CEO of The Steele Foundation for Hope, put the investment case plainly. “They built it in South Africa, one of the world’s highest-burden countries, with clinical partners on the ground and patients in the room,” he said, per Bizcommunity. “That proximity shapes everything.”
Why This Signals Something Bigger
Global health has historically been treated as a philanthropy problem rather than an investment opportunity. The organisations working on TB, malaria, and other high-burden diseases in low-income countries have largely depended on grants and development finance rather than commercial capital.
AI Diagnostics CEO Braden van Breda made the point directly. “TB has historically been underfunded relative to its burden,” he said, per TechMoran. “This signals that investors increasingly see global health not just as philanthropy, but as a viable and scalable commercial opportunity.”
That framing matters. A startup that can screen for TB affordably, accurately, and without specialist infrastructure does not just solve a health problem. It builds a platform. The company is already exploring how its acoustic AI technology can be adapted for cardiovascular and broader respiratory screening, which would make the Ostium a general-purpose early-warning tool rather than a single-disease device.
South Africa is building this. That is worth paying attention to.
