The Mandrake Bio Pre-Seed round of ₹16 crore marks a significant early-stage bet on India’s emerging AI-biotech frontier, as publicly reported on 2026-07-16. Bengaluru-based Mandrake Bio has secured this funding in a round co-led by Activate and Antler, with participation from Spectrum Impact, DeVC, and prominent angel investors. The startup designs programmable gene-editing enzymes from scratch using generative AI — a foundational approach that sets it apart from conventional gene-editing technologies such as CRISPR-Cas9.
Quick Highlights
- Founders: Tanay Lohia (Founder & CEO) and Dr Kutubuddin Molla (Scientific Co-founder)
- Lead Investors: Activate and Antler
- Participating Investors: Spectrum Impact, DeVC, Dr Vijay Chandru, Paras Chopra, Sanjiv Rangrass, and Vatsal Dusad
- Investor Background: Antler India has backed over 80 startups through its inaugural ₹600 crore pre-seed fund spanning AI, deep tech, health, and climate; Activate is an early-stage deep-tech-focused investor co-founded by Pratyush Choudhury
- Headquarters: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
- Announcement Date: 16 July 2026
Funding Breakdown
Use of Funds
As publicly reported, the fresh capital will be deployed across three priority areas. First, Mandrake Bio will advance its AI-based protein-design platform, refining the generative AI models and structural biology tools that underpin its enzyme design process. Second, the company will invest in compute infrastructure to support the computational demands of its platform. Third, the funds will scale wet-lab validation — the physical laboratory testing of AI-designed enzymes — across both agricultural and medical applications. Alongside these technical investments, the startup will expand its core research team by hiring specialists in artificial intelligence and biophysics.
Funding Timeline
The ₹16 crore pre-seed round, announced on 16 July 2026, represents Mandrake Bio’s first publicly disclosed external funding round. Founded in March 2025, the company has moved from inception to its debut institutional raise within approximately fifteen months. As publicly reported, the startup plans to use lab validation results from its first enzyme designs — expected within two months — to support a future, larger fundraise.
Expansion Plans
Mandrake Bio is initially prioritising agriculture, engineering compact, AI-designed enzymes for crops that require fewer pesticides and fertilisers and are more resilient to climate change. In parallel, the company is designing gene editors with medical therapeutic applications in mind, targeting conditions where existing tools fall short due to size or delivery constraints. On the commercial side, the startup plans to operate a licensing model — supplying its proprietary enzyme designs to seed companies and therapeutic developers rather than developing end-consumer products itself. The current eight-person team is expected to grow quickly as the company scales hiring across AI research and wet-lab science.
Significance
Mandrake Bio’s pre-seed raise signals a maturing appetite among Indian investors for foundational deep-tech bets, moving beyond fast-scaling consumer models toward longer-horizon, research-intensive companies. The startup’s approach — designing gene-editing enzymes from computational first principles rather than adapting naturally occurring proteins — represents a genuine scientific departure from the CRISPR paradigm that has dominated the field for over a decade. Notably, the company won the global GEM × Adaptyv RBX1 Protein Design Competition at ICLR 2026, where its AI platform delivered the only submission to receive the competition’s highest “Strong” rating among more than 12,000 entries, providing rare early external validation of its technology. For India’s deep-tech ecosystem, a pre-seed company achieving world-class benchmarks before its first institutional round underlines the country’s growing capacity to compete at the global frontier of AI-driven biology.
These details have been verified against multiple publicly available reports as of 2026-07-16.
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Disclaimer: This report is compiled from publicly available sources and is for informational purposes only; funding figures are as publicly reported and may be subject to change.
