Vitalls bags $1.5 million to put your medical history in your pocket

Move from Dubai to London, and your medical history stays behind. That gap costs patients repeated tests and delayed care, and a UAE startup now has fresh money to close it. Vitalls, founded in 2023 by Mehdi Bouchenak, has secured a $1.5 million commitment from EST Growmore, the investment arm of Singapore-based EST Group.

The deal was signed at the Abu Dhabi Future Health Summit by Bouchenak and Dr. Sindhu Bhaskar, Chairman of EST Group. EST Growmore joins the seed round as anchor investor and holds an option to add another $1 million.

Vitalls builds an AI-powered digital health passport. Individuals and families store, manage and share their medical records across providers and countries, and they decide who sees what.

The funds will be used for...

The money will go toward developing and rolling out the passport. The target users are internationally mobile individuals, families and enterprises.

Capital is only part of the deal. The two companies will also explore distribution, product development and strategic partnerships across EST Group's telecommunications and healthcare investments. For a young company, access to telecom channels could matter as much as the cheque.

Why does it matter?

The GCC is built on mobility. Expatriates make up the majority of the population in the UAE, and millions of workers and families move between Gulf cities and home countries. Their records end up scattered across clinics and laboratories, in different languages and formats.

Bouchenak argues that patient-owned records are no longer a niche idea. That's a bold claim, but the logic is hard to dismiss. Records that follow the patient cut duplication, speed up diagnosis and give people control over their own data.

Still, a passport is only useful if providers accept it. Adoption across hospitals and clinics will decide whether Vitalls becomes infrastructure or stays a good idea.

The context

The announcement fits a wider regional push. The UAE has been building national health data systems and promoting digital health through events like the Abu Dhabi summit, while Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 and other GCC strategies make health data and AI central to reform.

Patient consent and data protection sit at the heart of those efforts, and cross-border sharing adds complexity. Vitalls is betting that user-controlled records can answer both concerns.

Dr. Bhaskar said his group studied the problem and is convinced. Now the startup has to show that providers and patients are too.