India has one of the largest diabetic populations on the planet, and diabetic retinopathy — the leading cause of preventable blindness among working-age adults — moves silently through it. The standard tool for catching it is a table-sized fundus camera: expensive, stationary, operated by a specialist, and usually hours away from the patient who needs it most. A Bengaluru company asked a simpler question — what if the camera fit on a phone, the AI ran inside the phone, and the screening came to the village instead of the other way around?
Remidio Innovative Solutions’ answer is the Insta FOP NM-10: a handheld, non-mydriatic fundus camera built around a smartphone. The company says its patented annular-illumination optics capture a 40° view of the retina in a single shot — no dilating drops, no darkroom — with internal fixation and autocapture so a trained frontline worker can take a clinical-grade image in seconds, all in a 1.1-kg device that runs about seven hours on a charge. The screening itself runs on Medios AI, the company’s offline artificial-intelligence suite that lives on the device: it flags referable diabetic retinopathy, and the newer Medios HI platform extends the same on-device screening to glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration. Published prospective studies cited by the company put referable-DR detection at 93% sensitivity and 92.5% specificity, referable glaucoma at 91% sensitivity and 93% specificity, and referable AMD at about 90.6% sensitivity and 85.4% specificity.
The validation behind those numbers is unusually deep for a medical device from an Indian startup. Remidio’s work has been published in JAMA Ophthalmology, Nature, the Indian Journal of Ophthalmology and dozens more journals — the company counts more than 90 research publications and 35-plus patents filed. The regulatory stack matches: the algorithms were, per the company, the first AI eye-screening tools to receive CDSCO approval in India, with the glaucoma and AMD tools cleared in May 2025; EU MDR Class II certification; and FDA 510(k) registration in the United States. An August 2026 study across 193 adults and 371 eyes at Pune’s NIO Super Specialty Hospital found the FOP NM-10 with Medios AI capable of screening for DR, glaucoma and AMD entirely offline — a detail that matters enormously for outreach camps with no connectivity.
Image: Remidio (the Insta FOP NM-10, a handheld non-mydriatic smartphone-based fundus camera).
The deployments read like a who’s-who of eye care. Aravind Eye Hospital — the world’s largest eye-care system — uses Fundus on Phone across its vision centres; its CMO Dr R. Venkatesh credits the device with helping prevent needless blindness among its patients. In the US, Remidio partnered with Intelligent Retinal Imaging Systems (IRIS) to push sight-saving diabetic eye exams into primary care, and its hardware is in use at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami. The company says more than 4,000 of its devices are deployed across 55-plus countries, with over 16 million patients screened — and that customers have imaged more than ten million patients on the FOP in five years. In February 2025, the Government of Kerala and Remidio launched Nayanamritham 2.0, billed as the world’s first government-backed AI-powered screening programme for chronic eye diseases.
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Remidio’s AI in action in Andhra Pradesh. Video: Remidio (official company channel).
The next frontier is bigger than eyes. Remidio’s oculomics research treats the retina — the only place in the body where blood vessels can be seen non-invasively — as a window into whole-body health, with AI models exploring cardiovascular and chronic kidney disease risk signals. A Gates Foundation grant is now funding the deployment of Remidio’s AI retinal scans in maternal-health programmes across Africa and India, aimed at catching pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes earlier, closer to where women actually receive care. “Our objective at Remidio is to prevent avoidable blindness,” says founder and CEO Dr Anand Sivaraman. With a camera that fits in a pocket and intelligence that needs no internet, the company is steadily turning the most under-served eye patients on earth into the best-screened ones.
Image: Remidio (a health worker screening a patient with the Insta FOP NM-10 in the field).
