From Vizag to Apple, this IIT Kanpur girl is now using AI to help people deal with chronic illness

Meet Praneeta Pujari who worked at Apple for six years then decided to start her own startup. It is called UniqueHuman. With it, she wants to make chronic illness a bit easier to handle and treat with some help from AI agents.

Praneeta Pujari has many good qualities. But one thing that tops them all is curiosity. It was sheer curiosity that guided her from the coast of Visakhapatnam to the research facilities of IIT Kanpur and eventually inside the sprawling Apple spaceship campus in Cupertino, California. When curiosity struck again, she found herself leaving her high-profile job to build UniqueHuman, an AI health startup that is using AI agents to treat people with chronic illness.

“I had a lot of questions growing up about different career paths and what was possible out there. I saw IIT as my way of finding answers and getting exposure to a wider world of professional opportunities,” Pujari tells India Today Tech.

Studying mechanical engineering at one of the country’s top prestigious colleges was a ticket to explore the world beyond what she had known growing up. But exploring this new world, she would find out later, won’t be easy.

“I was the only girl in a class of 101 students. So that kind of set the tone for the rest of my career. It was always about fighting to be the insider,” she says.

Working at Apple

Pujari landed a job at Flipkart fresh out of college. She will work there for three years before moving to the US to pursue an MBA. In 2019, she was hired by Apple. For the next six years, she would work through four different roles starting with product planning for accessories before moving to the iPhone and later leading worldwide product planning for the Apple Watch. In a way, working at Apple would give her real-life lessons to shape her next big calling.

“Nothing is left to chance or luck at Apple,” she says, describing Cupertino’s approach to building products and customer loyalty.

But it was Apple's approach to privacy that left a long-lasting impression on her. She learnt that trust could not be an afterthought particularly when dealing with user data.

“What I learned from Apple is that that's a strategy in itself,” she notes. “If you can build a brand that people can trust with their health data, that is a very unique advantage.”

At Apple, certain employees have access to doctors through an app, with their health information connected in one place, Pujari reveals, adding that it was a privilege “to get this level of healthcare,” knowing that “the rest of the world didn’t have access to that.”

While her experience at IIT, Flipkart, and Apple helped shape how she thinks about building products, the idea behind UniqueHuman is also deeply personal.

Building UniqueHuman

Her mother has lived with chronic pain for years. Pujari, who has lived away from home for a major part of her adult life, taking care of her mother remotely was certainly not easy. “I was surprised how just not having answers and not having someone that can proactively take care of your health causes so much avoidable suffering,” she says. She recalls that there were times when she felt guilty that she could not find answers for her mother sooner. “I wish there's a way I could find this out sooner.”

This realisation helped lay the foundation for UniqueHuman, a platform that uses health data and agentic AI to help people living with chronic conditions better understand their health and spot signs of a flare-up before it gets worse.

“For someone with a chronic illness, UniqueHuman is very much the supportive companion that they have. It sees your full health story, finds patterns early and helps you act,” Pujari says.

“What if your data on your phone, on your watch, your fitness band or ring — just the digital data that exists about you — already knows something about your health, but you're simply not able to tap into it,” she asks. That, she says, is the idea behind UniqueHuman.

UniqueHuman is an app-based platform currently only available for iPhone users. Inside, you’ll find Niq, an AI assistant which can access their wearable data, medical records, lab reports and symptom logs on permission, then looks for possible patterns, flags signs of any potential flare-up and directs them towards the right treatment.

Rather than focusing mainly on fitness or answering individual questions, Pujari says the platform is designed for people living with chronic conditions, whose health issues can be complex and interconnected, and who often have to spend considerable time figuring out what is happening to their bodies and what to do next.

“For someone with a chronic illness, UniqueHuman is very much the supportive companion that they have,” she says.

UniqueHuma also wants to help users find doctors, arrange appointments and navigate treatment options. Whether it can predict flare-ups and help improve care remains to be seen, but Pujari wants to make managing a chronic condition a little easier.

For now, UniqueHuman is focused on the US, where medical records and healthcare providers are easier to connect digitally. Pujari hopes to bring the platform to India someday.

“My goal is definitely to bring this to loved ones all over the world,” she says. “If we are bringing it to anyone all over the world after the US and the Western countries, obviously India would be next on our chart.”

For Pujari, the journey from Vizag to Apple and now building her own startup brings things full circle. The curiosity that once pushed her to explore unfamiliar places and career paths is now driving her to tackle a problem, she has seen up close.

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