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South African MedTech company AI Diagnostics has secured $5.1 million (R85 million) in a pre-Series A funding round to accelerate the rollout of its AI-driven tuberculosis screening tool.
The round was led by The Steele Foundation for Hope, with participation from the iFSP Group and the Global Innovation Fund (GIF), along with follow-on contributions from key early angel investors.
In March 2026, the Global Innovation Fund (GIF) had invested $300k in pre-Series A funding, and the startup counts Africa Health Ventures and Savant among its investors. The new funding will aid clinical research and validation, continued development of the product and AI model, and building the operational infrastructure necessary to scale a medical device business in South Africa and emerging markets across sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.
“We back technical entrepreneurs who are closest to the problems they’re solving, and AI Diagnostics is a clear example of why that matters,” said Joe Exner, CEO of The Steele Foundation for Hope.
Founded in 2020 by Braden van Breda, Johan Coetzee, and Mark van Breda, the Cape Town-based AI Diagnostics has built a portable digital stethoscope that can flag possible TB in under five minutes without the need for specialist equipment or infrastructure. It is a simple, fast screening method using a portable digital stethoscope, a mobile app, and an AI model
The process is simple: a health worker records a patient’s breathing using the digital stethoscope, and the AI analyses the lung sounds to flag possible tuberculosis. The tool serves as a front line to identify individuals who need confirmatory testing, rather than a definitive diagnostic test. Based on the result, the health worker can rule out TB or send the patient for further testing.
AI Diagnostics has trained its AI model on more than 50,000 validated lung recordings and has demonstrated a 66% reduction in missed TB+ patients, while being 1.4 times more efficient than traditional symptomatic screening.
“They’ve built novel hardware: an AI-enabled digital stethoscope that detects TB through lung sound analysis with point-of-care accuracy that simply wasn’t possible before. In communities without X-ray infrastructure or specialist clinicians, this puts real diagnostic capability in the hands of nurses and community health workers,” added Exner.
The funding for AI Diagnostics is not just for the startup but for solving South Africa’s TB burden. According to the 2025 World TB Report by the WHO (World Health Organisation), 249,000 people fell ill with TB in South Africa in 2024, and an estimated 54,000 died from the disease. A national TB prevalence survey found that 58% of people who tested positive for TB showed no symptoms.
“For health systems trying to close the detection gap, this [AI Diagnostics] changes the availability and the geography of screening,” said Braden van Breda, CEO of AI Diagnostics.
AI Diagnostics wants to fix this very gap and has regulatory approval from the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (SAHPRA) and has already screened more than 1,000 patients in South Africa. It also has clinical research ongoing across more than 10 countries in Africa and Asia.
Speaking for iFSP Venture Capital, Jan van Staden said the investment was driven by both transformative social impact and exceptional leadership.“We have found that solutions developed in this context are often better adapted to real-world constraints, such as cost sensitivity, infrastructure limitations, and patient behaviour, which positions South African innovation well for broader deployment across emerging markets, and even developed markets,” said Lily Steele, managing director of Investments at GIF.
While TB screening is the immediate focus, AI Diagnostics is also exploring how its technologies can be applied to screening across multiple lung and heart conditions. Rowena Luk, managing partner at Africa Health Ventures, sees the stethoscope – largely unchanged for over a century – transforming in the coming decade.
