PinkTree Foundation

PinkTree Foundation is an Indian nonprofit working on lung health and respiratory disease, framed around what it calls the right to breathe clean air. It focuses on preventable lung disease in rural and underserved communities, where conditions like asthma often go undiagnosed. Its central tool is a vocal biomarker test, which it describes as the first such technology deployed on the ground in India: a person speaks into a phone and an AI model flags early signs of lung risk in under six seconds, without a doctor, a machine or an internet connection. The organisation runs this as a three-step model of screen, protect and empower, so that a result is followed by education in local languages and a referral into a care network rather than left as a number. It positions the initial detection as always free to the individual, funded by partners and sponsored camps.

Headquarters: Mumbai, Maharashtra

Major Areas of Work

• Community screening: Bringing free, non-invasive lung risk screening directly into villages and underserved neighbourhoods through sponsored camps.

• Health technology: Building and deploying vocal biomarker testing, a lung health platform and real-time air quality insights for individuals to track their own risk.

• Health education: Explaining lung risk and its causes in local languages so that a screening result translates into understanding and action.

• Referral and care linkage: Connecting people flagged as high risk to a network of care providers rather than ending the interaction at the test.

• Community health worker capacity: Training frontline workers, including ASHA and Anganwadi workers and local women, so that lung health knowledge stays in the community.

Major Initiatives and Programmes

• Vocal biomarker voice test: An AI-powered voice screening that detects early signs of lung risk in under six seconds, works offline and requires no clinical equipment.

• Sponsored screening camps: Partner-funded free camps that carry the voice test into communities and build awareness and trust alongside the screening itself.

• PinkTree App: A platform through which individuals track their lung health, receive air quality information and get connected to care, with an optional paid subscription that keeps the initial detection free for everyone.

• Lung health worker training: A programme to train and certify local ASHA and Anganwadi workers and community women as lung health experts, embedding skills rather than making one-off visits.

The vocal biomarker test is the flagship. It is what allows the rest of the model to work at community scale: because it needs only a phone and six seconds of speech, screening can happen without clinicians, diagnostic machines or connectivity, which is what makes reaching villages practical. Everything else the organisation does, from education to referral to worker training, is built around what that test surfaces.

Impact

PinkTree Foundation states it has screened and educated over 1,000 people, reached more than 5 villages, trained over 100 health workers and referred more than 800 people for care, with 40% of screenings being women, a group it identifies as particularly vulnerable. Its own site cites the scale of the problem it is addressing as 95% of Indians breathing air that fails WHO safety standards, over 50 million Indians living with asthma, and an annual economic cost of air pollution of roughly Rs 63,000 crore (USD 8.5 billion).

This is a good fit for someone who wants to work where health technology meets frontline delivery rather than sitting on one side of that line. The work spans AI-based diagnostics, mobile product, community mobilisation and frontline health worker training, so the exposure runs from model output to what a village health worker does with it. It suits people comfortable with an early-stage organisation, where the screening numbers are still in the thousands and the systems around them are actively being built, and who want direct contact with the communities the product is meant to serve.