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Inside Medantrik’s Bet on Preventive Respiratory Healthcare

• ByStartupStory     |    July 13, 2026

India Doesn’t Have a Respiratory Care Problem. It Has an Early Detection Problem.

Priyaranjan Tiwari didn’t find this problem in a research paper. He found it in a hospital ward in Kanpur, during India’s worst public health emergency in decades COVID-19, holding a device he had built himself and watching it contradict everything the machine next to it was claiming.

That gap between what the data said and what was actually happening became the founding question of Medantrik Medtech. Because in India, respiratory disease quietly claims more lives every year than most people realise  not for lack of treatment, but for lack of detection. Most patients only find out something is wrong when it’s already too late to prevent it.

Priyaranjan and co-founder Prikshit Hooda are building to change that

From a Crisis Comes a Company

When India’s second COVID wave broke in 2021, the oxygen shortage wasn’t just a logistical failure it was a systems failure. Hospitals couldn’t verify whether the concentrators being rushed in from across the country were actually delivering medical-grade oxygen. Priyaranjan joined a nationwide volunteer collective of engineers and IIT researchers to solve exactly that.

He developed the motherboard that powered these concentrators and built India’s first Oxygen Purity Meter, a device that could verify, in real time, whether oxygen being delivered to patients met medical standards. What cost upwards of a lakh rupees as an import was made available for ₹8,000. The team’s work later contributed to drafting the Bureau of Indian Standards framework for oxygen purity meters. 

It was through this network that Priyaranjan connected with Prikshit Hooda, an IIT Kanpur alumnus leading concentrator and ventilator development out of the same campus. Their collaboration began transactionally 

 Prikshit’s team needed a purity meter, Priyaranjan had one. The conversations that followed went much further than oxygen

A Different Problem to Solve

While working with hospitals during the oxygen crisis, Priyaranjan met pulmonologist Dr. Anand Kumar at GSVM Medical College in Kanpur. The discussion quickly moved beyond oxygen concentrators to a far bigger issue respiratory diseases are often diagnosed too late because affordable and reliable diagnostic tools remain out of reach for most people.

That conversation changed everything. If blood pressure and blood sugar could be monitored at home, why couldn’t lung health? The question led Priyaranjan Tiwari and Prikshit Hooda to found Medantrik Medtech in 2022, with a mission to make respiratory care more preventive, accessible, and affordable.

What Medantrik Is Building And Why the Order Matters

Medantrik’s product vision is built around two devices that serve different purposes and, by design, different moments in a person’s relationship with their own respiratory health.

The first is Nodex  a compact, auto-calibrated handheld device that brings clinical-grade lung function testing out of the lab and into everyday settings. Priced at approximately ₹6,000, it is designed for use by healthcare professionals and patients alike, enabling accurate respiratory diagnostics without expensive equipment or specialist calibration. The long-term vision is straightforward, make Nodex as common in Indian homes as a blood pressure monitor.

But Medantrik isn’t leading with Nodex. And that choice says everything about how carefully the founders have thought about the market they’re building.

The second product is Iron Lung  and it isn’t a medical device at all. It’s a respiratory wellness station, built for gyms. Each user receives a personalised smart card linked to their age, weight, height, and gender. The device uses this profile to calculate their ideal lung health baseline, then guides them through daily breathing exercises while tracking improvement over time  the same feedback loop that keeps people returning to a treadmill, applied to their lungs.

Rather than waiting for illness to drive awareness, Medantrik is introducing Iron Lung in gyms, encouraging people to monitor their lung health as part of everyday wellness. The idea is simple: build awareness first, create the market next a strategy the company is now backing with patents in progress.

Scaling the Vision

Backed by approximately ₹1.5 crore in government grants through the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, national innovation programmes, and competitive hackathons, Medantrik Medtech has steadily moved from research to production. The company has also established its own manufacturing facility, strengthening its ability to scale respiratory technologies built in India.

Today, Medantrik’s portfolio includes NODEX, a portable respiratory diagnostic device, and Iron Lung, a wellness platform designed to encourage preventive lung care. Together, they reflect the company’s broader effort to make respiratory healthcare more accessible, affordable, and proactive.

The Road Ahead for Medantrik 

Over the next few years, Medantrik aims to expand the reach of both products, with plans to deploy 10,000 Iron Lung systems and 1.5 lakh NODEX devices. But for founders Priyaranjan Tiwari and Prikshit Hooda, the larger goal isn’t just scale it’s changing how people think about lung health.

Their vision is to make respiratory monitoring as routine as checking blood pressure, shifting the conversation from treatment after illness to prevention before symptoms appear. 

If that happens, Medantrik’s biggest achievement won’t simply be the devices it builds, but the habit it helps create.

 

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