TCS | The Cape Town start-up listening for TB with AI

TCS | The Cape Town start-up listening for TB with AI

From TechCentral by TechCentral

May 4, 2026 · 37 min

About this episode

In this episode, Nkosinathi Ndlovu interviews Braden van Breda about AI Diagnostics' AI-powered stethoscope designed to detect tuberculosis and its recent funding round.

AI Diagnostics, a Cape Town-based med-tech company that has built an AI-powered stethoscope designed to detect tuberculosis, recently raised R85-million in a pre-series-A funding round. In this episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS), Nkosinathi Ndlovu speaks to the company’s CEO, Braden van Breda, about the funding round and its mission to transform TB screening across Africa and Asia. The round, led by the Steele Foundation for Hope, will fund the deployment of the Ostium – an AI-powered digital stethoscope that works in tandem with the company’s proprietary AI.TB model. The device is designed to detect signals associated with tuberculosis in lung sounds in real time, putting point-of-care diagnostic capabilities into the hands of the nurses, pharmacists and community health workers who often serve as the first contact in resource-constrained health systems. In a wide-ranging conversation, Van Breda explains why AI Diagnostics chose to tackle one of the world’s most underfunded diseases, and how an AI model can pick up TB signals that escape even trained clinicians. He also unpacks the painstaking work of building a TB-positive lung-sound dataset from scratch. Van Breda also…

People in this episode

Host: Nkosinathi Ndlovu

Guest: Braden van Breda

Topics covered

Keywords

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: AI Diagnostics, Steele Foundation for Hope

Products: Ostium

Books & works: AI.TB model

Places: Cape Town, Africa, Asia

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