How Indian Innovations Are Fighting Blindness, Illness & Cyber Threats Around the World

A student in Lucknow dreams of Oxford. A child in Chennai learns healthier habits through a mobile game. In Ethiopia, a newborn’s eyesight is saved by a portable device built in India.

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These aren’t isolated moments. They show how India’s frontier technologies are quietly reshaping lives across the world — built not just for local problems, but for questions every nation wrestles with: keeping systems secure, making education fairer, preventing illness before it strikes.

In 2024, the UN ranked India 36th of 170 nations on its frontier technologies readiness index, up from 48 in 2022. It marks a journey from being a buyer of tech to becoming a builder of solutions that travel across borders.

And at the heart of these stories lies a simple truth: when technology is designed for real contexts, priced for access, and rooted in purpose, it can move faster — and reach farther.

Why the world turns to an Indian platform for digital safety

As digital transformation touches everything from banks to hospitals and even government systems, one challenge looms large: keeping data safe. 

Cyberattacks today cost businesses billions of dollars, with increasingly sophisticated threats targeting critical infrastructure at a scale never seen before. Traditional defences often struggle to keep pace, creating an urgent need for predictive, AI-powered tools that can anticipate breaches before they strike.

This was the vision that drove Saket Modi when he co-founded Lucideus in 2012. What began as an ethical hacking venture soon grew into a trusted partner for India’s banks, ministries, and telecoms. The 2016 breach crisis proved to be a turning point, exposing systemic vulnerabilities and pushing the young company into the national spotlight.

By 2021, Lucideus had rebranded as Safe Security and shifted its global headquarters to Silicon Valley, with operations now spanning North America, Europe, and Asia. At its heart lies an AI-powered risk quantification engine that goes beyond flagging technical issues. 

It translates cyber threats into real-time, dollar-value metrics, allowing Fortune 500 companies, global banks, and telecom giants to see risk in business terms, prioritise fixes, and act with clarity. Integrated with international frameworks like GDPR and NIST, Safe Security shows how Indian innovation is shaping global standards in cybersecurity.

When data becomes a student’s best counsellor

For many Indian students, the dream of studying abroad gets lost in endless forms, shifting rules, and counsellors who charge more than most families can afford.

This struggle led IIT-BHU graduates Dirghayu Kaushik and Vikrant Shivalik to launch Ambitio in 2023, India’s first AI-powered admissions platform. It guides students step by step through complex applications with data-driven precision.

Ambitio benchmarks millions of data points against one million successful applications — from Ivy League to Oxbridge — to create personalised pathways. Features like profile gap analysis, essay feedback, and alumni mentoring help students choose the right universities and present their best selves.

Dirghayu remembers his own anxiety. “I wanted to pursue a master’s but didn’t know which college to choose. The paperwork and the uncertainty made me very tense. I could only find expensive counsellors who weren’t accessible to everyone. That’s when the idea for Ambitio was born.”

In its first year, Ambitio helped more than 5,000 students apply to Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, Columbia, and TU Munich — with a 98% success rate. After raising $2 million in seed funding, the team began scaling to reach half a million students, focusing on Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities where guidance is scarce.

One such student, Prakhar Kamal, who secured admission to Warwick Business School, says, “I was already working with a counsellor before Ambitio, but it wasn’t a good experience, and I lost motivation. When I started using Ambitio, I regained confidence. The platform helped me find the right colleges and choose the best fit.”

By making global education accessible and affordable, Ambitio offers a model that other developing nations could follow.

Reimagining vaccines for the digital age

In 2013, biomedical tech entrepreneur Bhargav Sri Prakash wondered why healthcare paid more attention to treatment than to preventing illness in children. As a parent, he wanted a tool that could protect children before illness struck. That idea grew into FriendsLearn, the company behind the world’s first patented Digital Vaccine.

Digital Vaccines are non-invasive, AI-driven tools that blend neurocognitive computing, gamification, and behavioural science to build healthier habits. Through a mobile game called Fooya!, children take part in playful challenges that influence their everyday health choices.

Bhargav explains, “A child experiences everything like gamified content. We don’t do this in an invasive way, but use sensory pathways like sight, touch, and hearing. Those pathways allow us to create certain patterns of neural response in the brain through this content.”

The approach marks a shift from treatment to prevention. By nudging children early, it aims to cut risks of lifestyle diseases like diabetes and heart conditions, along with infections that place heavy burdens on families and health systems.

In 2022, the US Patent and Trademark Office awarded FriendsLearn the first patent for a Digital Vaccine. Clinical validation has come from Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and Johns Hopkins, with randomised trials showing measurable reductions in health risks. More than half a million children worldwide have already been “digitally vaccinated”.

Professor Rema Padman of Carnegie Mellon notes, “These games aim to neuro-cognitively train children to make healthier choices. The question is whether those changes transfer to the real world. Our trials are showing promising evidence that they do.”

By supporting India’s National Health Mission and aligning with frameworks like COPPA and GDPR, Digital Vaccines places India at the forefront of preventive health tech and offers a replicable global model.

A small device taking blindness head-on

India is home to nearly a third of the world’s blind population, even though more than 80% of cases can be prevented through timely screening. In rural regions, however, a shortage of ophthalmologists and the steep cost of equipment leave millions vulnerable to avoidable vision loss.

This reality struck K Chandrasekhar, a BITS Pilani graduate, during a seminar on how blindness can trap entire families in poverty. “If one person loses sight, the whole household suffers. I felt we needed a tool that was affordable, portable, and simple,” he recalls. Partnering with Dr Shyam Vasudeva Rao, he founded Forus Health in 2010.

Their solution was 3Nethra, a compact, AI-powered eye-screening device. Unlike heavy machines requiring specialists, it can be operated by minimally trained technicians and detects cataracts, glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, corneal problems, and other disorders — often in less than five minutes.

Built for rural realities, 3Nethra runs for hours on just 10 watts of power, captures high-resolution retinal images, and uploads them to the cloud for remote interpretation. This allows early diagnosis and prompt referral even in underserved areas.

Since its launch, 3Nethra has screened over 20 million people across 75 countries, spanning Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the United States. In India, it is widely used by government programmes and hospitals. Karnataka’s KIDROP initiative, for instance, deploys it in neonatal intensive care units to detect Retinopathy of Prematurity in preterm infants.

Dr T Senthil, an ophthalmologist in Chennai, observes, “One in four diabetic patients in India faces retina-related complications, yet there aren’t enough specialists to examine them. Devices like 3Nethra make screening accessible.”

From Mexico to Myanmar, Ethiopia to Mumbai’s slums, 3Nethra delivers quality eye care at about one-third the price of comparable systems, offering a scalable global blueprint for preventing needless blindness.

India’s innovation story is just beginning

From safeguarding digital systems to making classrooms more accessible, from giving children tools to stay healthier to stopping blindness before it strikes, India’s frontier technologies are leaving their imprint across the globe.

What ties these breakthroughs together is not only their technical brilliance but their grounding in everyday realities. Indian innovators are asking questions that matter to families everywhere: How do we keep our economies safe? How do we ensure children grow up healthier? How do we make opportunities available to every learner? How do we stop millions from losing sight?

The world is beginning to notice. A 2024 NASSCOM report projects India’s AI market could add $500 billion to the economy by 2025, nearly 10% of GDP. PwC estimates AI may contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, with India among the largest beneficiaries. The WHO, too, points to low-cost devices like portable eye screeners as vital to reducing preventable blindness.

The path ahead is ambitious. But if India continues to build innovations rooted in human need, it can offer models for the Global South — and for the world — to follow. 

India’s frontier tech journey is still unfolding.

And you can be a part of it here.