Rohit Hiwale

Founder & CEO Morphle Labs

Last Reviewed: September 25, 2026

Executive Summary

Rohit Hiwale is the founder and chief executive of Morphle Labs, a Bengaluru company that builds robotic and imaging hardware for histopathology, the tissue-slide work at the centre of cancer diagnosis. He started it in 2017 and took it through Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch. Its two main products are RoboTome, which the company calls the first robotic microtome of its kind and which cuts biopsy blocks into sections, and MorphoLens, a line of whole-slide scanners that digitise slides so they can be read remotely. Radiology and haematology went digital years ago. Anatomic pathology still depends heavily on manual bench work, and Hiwale’s argument is that this is where automation can do the most. In November 2025 Morphle raised a $5 million Series A from Inflexor Ventures to scale manufacturing, pursue regulatory approvals and expand in the US and Europe.

Career Highlights

• Founder and CEO of Morphle Labs, which he founded in 2017; the company was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch.
• Announced a $5 million Series A from Inflexor Ventures in November 2025, earmarked for global expansion, manufacturing scale-up and regulatory approvals.
• Built a product line spanning the RoboTome robotic microtome, the MorphoLens scanner family and a handwritten-requisition AI tool, with more than 80 patents filed according to the company.
• A second-time founder, according to the company’s funding announcement.
• Engineering experience at Walmart Labs and Rippling before Morphle.
• Alumnus of IIT Kharagpur.

Professional Journey

Before Morphle, Hiwale worked as an engineer at Walmart Labs and Rippling, and Morphle’s funding announcement calls him a second-time founder. He is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. Beyond that the public record is thin. More detailed accounts of his early career appear only on data-aggregator sites and are not repeated here.

He founded Morphle Labs in 2017 and joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch. The company began in digital pathology. Its MorphoLens whole-slide scanners turn glass microscope slides into images that pathologists can read on screen and share across sites. It sells to clinical pathology groups, dermatopathology practices and research labs, and its published case studies include tele-reporting for US hospital sites. Morphle says its products carry ISO 13485 certification and CE marking.

Morphle then moved further upstream in the lab workflow. RoboTome automates microtomy, the slicing of paraffin-embedded tissue blocks into thin sections, which is skilled manual work in most histology labs. The company says it cuts at more than twice the speed of an experienced histotechnologist and with more consistent section quality. It has also launched a product that uses optical character recognition to process handwritten requisition forms. Hiwale’s stated aim is to go further: “stitching together every broken link in the diagnostics chain” so that pathologists can concentrate on diagnosis.

In November 2025 Morphle announced a $5 million Series A from Inflexor Ventures. The money is for manufacturing of RoboTome and MorphoLens, regulatory approvals in more countries, and commercial growth in the US and Europe. At the time the company named its leadership as Hiwale as CEO, Ashish Manmode as CTO and Sunnel Daniel as COO, and put its team at about 100 people, based mainly in Bengaluru and Boston.

Education

Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur

Alumnus, per Morphle’s November 2025 funding announcement. The degree and field are not stated in any first-party or editorial source that could be read.