Digital health · Emerging market radiology
AlemHealth
Battery powered imaging hardware and cloud reporting software built for hospitals with unreliable electricity and thin bandwidth. Started in Kabul in 2014, incorporated in Singapore in 2015, and still running on a very small amount of disclosed capital.
A conversation with the cook
In 2013 Aschkan Abdul-Malek was living in Kabul, researching health care constraints in developing countries for the World Bank. The insight that ended his consulting career arrived at home, over an ordinary conversation with his cook.
The cook was spending six times his annual income to fly his wife to India for medical care she could not get in Afghanistan. She was one of a great many. In a country where the average income was around $680 a year, Afghans were collectively spending close to $300 million a year travelling abroad for treatment, Entrepreneur reported in 2016.
A lot of that travel bought nothing but a diagnosis. If the image could move, the patient would not have to.
The problem, stated plainly
Radiology is where the shortage bites hardest. There are too few radiologists worldwide, and the ones who exist are rarely in the same building as the scanner. Hospitals in low income countries own imaging machines, sometimes good ones, and then have nobody qualified to read what comes off them.
The workarounds are grim. Facilities courier CDs across the country. Clinicians photograph X-ray films on a phone and send compressed pictures over WhatsApp, which is not diagnostic quality by any measure. AlemHealth named both practices in its 2018 MIT Solve application as the baseline it was competing against.
Conventional radiology IT assumes fibre, mains power and an on site engineer. AlemHealth’s bet was that hardware and software designed together could be sold at a price a clinic in Kabul or Lagos could pay.
A lawyer, a racing driver, and a team in Dhaka
Abdul-Malek is the son of Iraqi and Iranian parents, raised in the United States, with a law degree and an MBA taken together at Vanderbilt in 2006. After an investment bank and a human rights nonprofit in northern Iraq, by 2010 he was running Altai Consulting’s Central Asia and Middle East practice on mandates for USAID, DFID, the World Bank and UN agencies. He is also an FIA licensed racing driver.
“At no stage was I ever that guy that would just get lost in a crowd,” he told Entrepreneur.
He hired an office manager in Kabul, brought in a co-founder with telemedicine experience based in the United Arab Emirates, Sajjad Kamal, and a team of Bangladeshi developers. The company opened in 2014. In February 2015 it joined the StartUp Health Academy in New York, one of six startups announced that month.
From couriered film to a box on the wall
The first version was not a product at all. Messengers carried X-ray and MRI films across Kabul to the AlemHealth office, where they were digitised and sent on to specialists in the United States and India. Once demand was proved, the company built hardware so hospitals could send images themselves and pay only when they used it.
That hardware became the AlemBox. NVIDIA wrote about it in October 2015: a gateway built on the Jetson TK1 development kit and the Tegra K1 processor, able to push large CT and MRI files over a 3G connection, with a diagnosis back in as little as 90 minutes. The price quoted then was $200. “We are changing how health care is delivered,” Abdul-Malek said, noting the units were small enough to fit ten to a backpack and could be carried into refugee camps.
Kabul was a useful laboratory. “It will test your redundancies in ways that you never planned for, and it allows you to build something that’s so robust and flexible that you can take it anywhere,” he said. It also taught him to document everything. When a client accused the company of breaking a CT scanner, the dispute went to a jirga, a traditional council, which brokered a $2,000 payment. “You’re sitting in someone’s living room with a bunch of old guys with beards, trying to explain to them the nuances of a CT machine,” he said.
In May 2015 the Dubai angel group WOMENA announced a $151,000 investment, its second ever. By early 2016 AlemHealth had opened in Lagos, and by that August was working with 15 facilities across the two countries. In March 2017 it went through Y Combinator’s Winter batch, with DCVC recorded as a seed investor from that period.
What it sells now
The line has widened into a full radiology stack: the AlemBox DICOM gateway with on board 4G and a battery, an AlemHub reporting server for reading centres, a desktop uploader, a FrontDesk scheduling module and a patient app. By 2025 the marketing had shifted to AI: a drafting assistant that turns dictated findings into structured reports, and a quality control assistant that flags inconsistencies before a radiologist signs. Prices are published, which is unusual and useful: free at 25 uploads a month, Connect $25 per facility per month, AlemBox Pro $79, AlemHub Enterprise $299.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Corporate registration | ALEMHEALTH PTE. LTD., Singapore number 201526966H, incorporated Jun 25, 2015. Paid up capital SGD 10,000. Status: live. Four officers or shareholders. Latest annual return Apr 7, 2026. Activity code SSIC 62090. | Public record |
| Clinical and US regulatory record | No FDA 510(k), no PMA, no registered trial, no NIH or NSF award, no PubMed paper, no SEC Form D. All searched Sep 2026. | Not found |
| The FDA approved viewer | Marketing pages describe an “FDA-approved” DICOM viewer. Nothing is cleared under AlemHealth, and the cleared device and its maker are not named. A licensed third party viewer would explain it. | Claim not matched |
| Independent count of use, 2016 | Stanford Social Innovation Review, reporting Wamda Research Lab fieldwork: AlemHealth “has diagnosed more than 3,000 cases, 600 per month, with more than 100 physicians reading its platform.” | Independent |
| Deployment footprint, 2016 | Entrepreneur, Aug 2016: 15 facilities across Afghanistan and Nigeria, with Iraq and Sudan planned. Vanderbilt’s version adds Kenya and Indonesia. | Independent |
| Hardware design | NVIDIA, Oct 2015: AlemBox on the Jetson TK1 and Tegra K1, $200, ten to a backpack, turnaround as fast as 90 minutes over 3G. | Independent |
| Scale claims, 2025 | Company site: more than 40 countries, 1 million patients, 1,000 providers. In 2018 it told MIT Solve it had “nearly 100 radiologists.” Neither figure has been audited. | Company-stated |
| Development finance partners | Company site names USAID, the IFC TechEmerge programme and the UN Stop TB Partnership. No award notice or partner announcement naming AlemHealth was found. | Company-stated |
| Named hospital customers | None disclosed by the company or found in reporting after 2016. | Not found |
| Headcount | PitchBook 19, Tracxn 17 in Jul 2026, GetLatka 11 for 2024. The Singapore register logged moves between 2 and 4 in late 2024. | Sources disagree |
Read plainly: the early years are unusually well documented for a company this size, because reporters went to Kabul and counted. The recent years are not. Everything after 2018, the country count, the patient count, the multilateral partnerships, rests on the company’s own pages. The registry confirms a live Singapore company. It does not confirm a single customer.
What to watch
- A named customer. Eleven years in, no hospital, ministry or screening programme is publicly identified.
- Identification of the FDA cleared viewer, which would close the one open conflict on this page.
- Any published USAID, IFC or Stop TB document that names AlemHealth.
- An independent evaluation of the AI reporting tools.
- A priced financing round. The last one with a public amount closed in 2015.
In their words
“At no stage was I ever that guy that would just get lost in a crowd.”
Aschkan Abdul-Malek, founder and CEO, Entrepreneur, 2016 · Independent
“It will test your redundancies in ways that you never planned for, and it allows you to build something that’s so robust and flexible that you can take it anywhere.”
Aschkan Abdul-Malek on building in Kabul, Entrepreneur, 2016 · Independent
“You’re sitting in someone’s living room with a bunch of old guys with beards, trying to explain to them the nuances of a CT machine”
Aschkan Abdul-Malek on a jirga settlement, Entrepreneur, 2016 · Independent
“We are changing how health care is delivered.”
Aschkan Abdul Malek, quoted by NVIDIA, October 2015 · Independent
“Since then, we’ve grown to 8 hospitals and hundreds of patients diagnosed, and are looking to expand into multiple countries in the coming months.”
Aschkan Abdul Malek to WOMENA, May 2015 · Company-stated
“Not waste time with investors that were only lukewarm about the business. If someone doesn’t absolutely love what you do after the first hour, run away.”
Aschkan Abdul Malek, asked what he would do differently, IdeaMensch, 2019 · Interview
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordALEMHEALTH PTE. LTD. registration, UEN 201526966H
- Public recordFDA 510(k) and PMA databases, no entry
- Public recordClinicalTrials.gov, NIH RePORTER, NSF and PubMed, no entries
- IndependentThis Startup is Fixing Health Care...in Kabul
- IndependentPushing Boundaries: Aschkan Abdul-Malek JD/MBA’06
- IndependentFortifying Health Care Startups in the Middle East and North Africa
- IndependentChanging the Delivery of Health Care with GPUs
- InterviewAschkan Abdul Malek, Founder of AlemHealth
- InvestorWOMENA’s second investment, Alem Health
- IndependentAlemHealth deal history, investors and headcount
- CompanyAlemHealth AI Radiologist in a Box submission
- CompanyAlemHealth global health solutions page
- CompanyAlemHealth home page, products and pricing tiers
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
