Salva Health bets portable AI screening can close LatAm's mammogram gap; wins Disrupt 2024

A medtech startup selling breast-cancer screening as a service: clinics get Julieta devices for free and payors are charged per screening, with an AI model assessing malignancy risk.

That a portable, radiation-free screening device with an AI risk model can move breast-cancer detection into primary care, paid per test by insurers.

About $2.5 million raised in total, including an undisclosed round with Epic Angels, Asiri Impact Fund, Impact Assets, EWA Capital and family offices (2025) and a $1.5 million round led by EWA Capital (2026).

Six years before her startup won TechCrunch Disrupt, Valentina Agudelo found a gap in breast-cancer survival rates between Latin America and the developed world while researching for a college entrepreneurship competition: late detection, driven by rural populations with no access to mammograms. She and her two best friends sketched a portable detection device, and shortly after the competition she founded Salva Health in Colombia, later working through an MBA at INSEAD while keeping the company her focus.

Salva Health developed Julieta, a small device that attaches electrodes to the breast, measures tissue density with electrical bioimpedance and returns results within minutes to a phone, tablet or computer. It partnered with insurer Grupo Sura on clinical trials and an AI model to predict breast-cancer risk, reached 13 employees, and in October 2024 won the $100,000 Startup Battlefield prize at TechCrunch Disrupt, beating more than 2,000 applicants. By September 2025 it had INVIMA approval in Colombia and paid pilots with the National League Against Cancer, the Air Force and insurers including Sura, and was raising capital with Epic Angels, Asiri Impact Fund, Impact Assets, EWA Capital and family offices, aiming at 500,000 tests a year by 2026.

Still scaling: as of August 2026 Salva Health had raised a $1.5 million round led by EWA Capital (about $2.5 million total), screened more than 2,500 women in Colombia and Venezuela, and won the Princesa de Girona 2025 award, with FDA recognition and expansion across LatAm, Africa and India planned.

Mammography infrastructure is expensive and concentrated in cities; a portable, radiation-free device can reach the rural majority that never gets screened.

The hardware-as-a-service model — free device, per-test payment from insurers — aligns Salva with the payor that benefits most from early detection and keeps data flowing back to improve the AI.

Winning Startup Battlefield gave a two-person-founded Colombian medtech global credibility, press and $100,000 before its first big market launch.

INVIMA approval plus commercial-treaty recognition lets one regulatory green light open several Latin American markets at once.

When the bottleneck is access, not technology, the business model has to follow the bottleneck: give hardware away, sell the screening as a service to whoever pays for outcomes.

As of August 2026, Salva Health is live in Colombia with INVIMA approval and paid pilots with insurers and health institutions, having screened more than 2,500 women in Colombia and Venezuela. It raised about $2.5 million total, most recently $1.5 million led by EWA Capital, and plans to manufacture at scale, reach 500,000 annual tests by 2026, and pursue FDA recognition plus expansion across Latin America, Africa and India. The open question is whether payors will pay per test at a price that makes the model work outside pilots.