Why We Invested in Omicsbank

The idea for OmicsBank took shape in 2024, when Sumit Sinha and Vijay Goel were working together at the Defeat-NCD Partnership (a WHO and UN-affiliated organization). They built a pooled procurement platform that aggregated more than $300M in demand for cancer and rare-disease medicines across 20+ low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), cutting prices by up to 80% and increasing access for patients in need. But the work kept returning them to the same question: why do life-saving drugs and personalized therapies still so rarely reach patients in emerging markets?

Sumit and Vijay identified the fundamental constraint: biology is not universal. Limited high-quality healthcare data from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America means billions of patients are not represented in the scientific research intended to treat them. Genetics, prevalence, and disease presentation all vary by geography and demographic group, but the datasets driving today’s clinical algorithms and drug R&D are heavily U.S. and EU-centric. This gap makes it challenging for researchers, pharmaceutical companies, and AI labs to predict safety and efficacy, design custom treatment approaches, and justify commercial expansion into new markets.

‘Modern medicine’ is built upon data representing a remarkably narrow slice of humanity. That insight became the foundation for OmicsBank.

The founders

Sumit and Vijay bring five prior founding experiences to OmicsBank alongside an impressive track record of launching, scaling, and exiting consumer and healthcare businesses.

Sumit’s first venture built analytics tools that tracked consumer activity inside mobile apps, selling the resulting behavioral data and insights to CPG brands to inform their engagement strategies. He scaled the business to $18M ARR before acquisition by a global CPG company. From there, Sumit launched an online food delivery platform focused on preparing healthy cuisine with international flair. The company was acquired within a year by a major Indian health and wellness platform. His first healthcare venture was a chronic-care platform providing EMR tooling for independent clinicians, a patient-facing care app, and a connected-device ecosystem that scaled to more than 5M users and 10K providers.

Vijay’s first venture was a creator monetization platform that let Indian creators build paid communities and host live sessions with fans, surpassing 100M interactions per month. He then built a platform that enabled healthcare organizations to easily deploy video-conferencing technology into their clinical workflows during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, filling a desperate need to connect patients with physicians when healthcare systems worldwide were under acute strain. The platform ultimately onboarded more than 1K clinicians while delivering 300K+ consultations.

Successfully scaling OmicsBank will require deploying global technology infrastructure that is purpose-built for the specific needs of LMIC healthcare delivery systems. Sumit and Vijay have spent the last 15+ years tackling these exact challenges, and we have strong conviction that they are uniquely suited to achieve OmicsBank’s transformational goals.

Why OmicsBank

Before joining Redesign, I worked at LabCorp managing its corporate venture fund and strategic partnerships function. That experience is one of the main reasons I believe Bio-AI use cases will be the most consequential application of recent AI advancements.

At one of the world's largest diagnostics laboratories, I witnessed daily how access to a database of 45B test results and 160M patient encounters per year can drive unique clinical insights and provide the opportunity to drastically accelerate drug development. It also taught me how challenging it can be to actually make use of that data, and that major gaps in healthcare real-world evidence still remain.

Roughly 90% of the world’s population lives outside the U.S. and the EU, yet clinical research and commercialization strategies continue to rely overwhelmingly on data from these two markets. The treatments we rely on, and increasingly the AI models we’re building, reflect the biology and recorded experience of only a small portion of the people they are ultimately meant to serve.

The data exists – it just needs to be freed. Every day, hospitals across the world generate enormous amounts of information through medical records, lab results, imaging studies, and biobanks, but lack the infrastructure to turn it into research-grade datasets that can be shared securely and responsibly with the global scientific community.

OmicsBank does the hard and practical work required to unlock it, building on-prem infrastructure directly inside hospitals, designed around the needs and regulations of emerging markets. The platform links multi-modal EHR, imaging, lab, and genomic data under a universal patient ID. It then de-identifies and standardizes disparate, messy data into internationally recognized nomenclature. OmicsBank has already built a network of more than 90 hospitals and labs across Asia, representing 12.5M patients, 30M DICOM images, 6M pathology slides, and 500K genome sequences.

Every major stakeholder in the healthcare ecosystem benefits from this approach. Hospital partners now have the tools to execute their own internal AI transformation initiatives, developing AI applications on top of OmicsBank’s technology stack to support improved clinical decision-making. Global pharma and biotech partners are currently putting OmicsBank data to use for biomarker discovery and real-world evidence studies across therapeutic areas including oncology, neurology, cardiology, nephrology, endocrinology, immunology, and dermatology. Frontier AI labs use OmicsBank’s market-specific data for reinforcement learning and broader post-training as they localize their models for global deployment.

What comes next

We’re proud to lead OmicsBank’s seed round with a $2.25M investment, supporting continued growth of its clinical data network and customer base across the U.S., Asia, and the Middle East.

As Redesign itself continues to expand globally (with operations now spanning the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and India), our growing international footprint provides a differentiated opportunity to support companies like OmicsBank.

It’s time to take a truly global approach to healthcare innovation. We’re proud to partner with Sumit and Vijay on this pursuit.