Predictmedix COO Rahul Kushwah: We aim to be a major player in workplace safety

What’s so special about your safe entry station and what’s the market potential?

Rahul: At Predictmedix, our focus is all about commercializing AI-based solutions that have a huge impact, especially on workplace health and safety. Talking about safe entry stations, as the name suggests, it’s about bringing safety into workplaces. Just how when you look at office buildings and airports, there are metal detectors, with safe entry stations, the premise is to roll out these non-invasive technologies in these walkways that can screen for symptoms of infectious diseases like Covid-19, and also screen for signs of impairment.

If you look at the industry overall, ever since Covid started, you have these temperature scanners that are available all over the place. But the biggest problem with these temperature scanners is that they are looking at your surface skin temperature. And so, the negative predictive value is somewhere between 50-60%, meaning that they are off most of the time. When it comes to our safe entry stations, these are looking at multiple symptoms that are associated with infectious diseases.

We have collected and are actively collecting data from clinical facilities, all over the world to train the AI algorithms. So in terms of going down into symptoms, we are setting at around 95%. And that’s where we have had some very successful deployment at tier 1 events and customers.

Do you think COVID has actually driven the market for these kinds of solutions?

Before Covid, we were actually working on adding AI functionality to safe entry stations, particularly for the flu pandemic, because it costs billions of dollars in lost productivity every year.  And next thing you know, we were in the midst of the Covid 19 pandemic. And that’s where we were able to pivot our technology particularly because of the clinical associations we have. And we were able to come out with a product that is very timely for Covid-19.

And now what we are realizing is that after the rounds of vaccinations, everyone is coming to the consensus that Covid is actually, to a large extent, here to stay. We cannot just shut down economies forever. We have to live. We have to play. We have to basically be in this environment and we have to learn how to adapt to this environment. And that is precisely where the safe entry stations come in.

Tell us a bit about the revenues that you are seeing, and touch upon the margins as well.  

There is the upfront hardware side to it. We actually make somewhere between $3,500 to $12,000 depending on which partner we are going through, which part of the world the units are being sold. And then there is the monthly SaaS model, which is basically dependent on the number of scans. Typically our contracts are 12 to 24 months and the monthly SaaS number can be anywhere between $1,500 to $3,000 a month.

Just today, we announced a revenue-generating placement at the Palm Tree Music Festival. Looking at our business model, for us to achieve multimillion-dollar revenue, we do not need tons of deployment.  At the same time, because it’s SaaS-based, you actually do have that recurring revenue there. So we have pretty high margins there as well.

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Tell us a bit about your other products –What’s the update there and have they started generating revenues?

When it comes to the impairment solution, it’s not generating revenue yet but the technology is on the verge of being commercialized. The way to look at it is when you get a safe entry station in a workplace, the same station that can run the impairments solution as well.

Along with that, we also have a remote patient monitoring platform. Right now, as we speak, we are adding some more AI-related functionality to it, whereby if there are certain changes in trends that are observed, the platform can send out alerts and also help physicians in decision making. And we do anticipate that to be rolled out sometime in the second half of this year.

What’s going to be the management’s focus over the next couple of years? And how do you see your cash balance?

The base focus for us is about workplace health and safety. Before Covid struck, everyone used to talk about it, but realistically, there wasn’t much that was being done about it. But now with Covid-19, workplace health and safety has come to the forefront. And we want to be the biggest force in the setting.

We do have a relatively low burn rate. It’s around $100,000 a month and based on our last financials, we were sitting at around $1.7 million. Considering that we are executing these multi-year contracts and there is definitely a lot more in the pipeline, we do not envision fundraising in the short term.

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Is uplisting to a major exchange on the cards at the moment?

Yes and that’s where we have partnered with Kingswood. Also at the same time, we have filed with the SEC to become a fully reporting US issuer and that should be coming to fruition within the next few weeks.

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