Vitalls raises $1.5 million in Abu Dhabi to unify cross-border health records with AI

Vitalls, a UAE health technology startup, announced securing a $1.5 million investment commitment in its seed round, led by EST Growmore, the investment arm of Singapore’s EST Group, with an additional option to inject another $1 million. The agreement was signed at the Abu Dhabi Future Health Summit, where the signing brought together founder and CEO Mahdi Bushnaq and Dr. Sindo Bahaskar, chairman of the EST Group, making the Singaporean company a principal investor in the round.

Vitalls was founded in 2023 in the UAE and is developing an AI-powered digital health passport that gives individuals and families the ability to store, manage and share their medical records securely across various healthcare providers and countries. The funding aims to accelerate technical development and broaden the platform’s rollout, targeting highly mobile individuals and families as well as multinational institutions and companies.

The platform addresses the core problem of fragmented medical records when patients move between cities, borders and health systems.While individuals are constantly on the move, their data and treatment histories remain locked in clinics and labs spread across disparate countries, using conflicting electronic languages and formats that do not interoperate. This information gap in clinical care settings leads to unnecessary duplicate diagnostic tests, delays in delivering appropriate treatment, and loss of vital data at critical moments that require urgent intervention.

The platform provides a unified repository fully under the patient’s control, where they own their comprehensive health record and can grant sharing permission to any doctor or treatment facility of their explicit choice. The new partnership does more than supply cash liquidity; it also opens channels for the startup to tap into EST Group’s investment ecosystem, including its telecommunications and healthcare subsidiaries. Both parties aim to explore joint distribution and development mechanisms for strategic partnerships to accelerate the platform’s regional and global rollout.

Mahdi Bushnaq explained that the move goes beyond its financial value to underscore the urgency and market relevance of the problem, noting that patient ownership of health records has become the inevitable path for modern medical care. Dr. Sindo Bahaskar added that millions of people live and travel far from their home countries while their health data remains scattered, emphasizing that the partnership will leverage the group’s investment network to drive platform growth and speed adoption.

In Gulf, Egyptian and Arab-East markets, this shift reshapes the priorities of HR departments and health insurers that face high costs managing a mobile workforce.In regions where professional mobility between capitals is high, the lack of linkage between insurance networks and local hospitals leads to repeated laboratory and imaging tests with each job or geographic move, raising annual insurance coverage costs for companies and employees. Adopting unified health-passport solutions enables compliance and technology officers to reduce financial waste from duplicate testing and to accelerate cross-border medical approvals without clashing with differing local data standards.

The expansion of decentralized health-record models forces regional tech leaders to align their digital infrastructure with strict sovereign health-data protection laws in countries such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The model’s success depends not only on intelligent record classification but also on medical and administrative teams’ ability to work with patients who carry their file and control its sharing, shifting data management from closed hospital servers to flexible, secure digital interfaces that cross borders safely.