Bengaluru-based biotech startup Mandrake Bio has raised approximately ₹16 crore in a pre-seed funding round co-led by Activate and Antler, as it looks to develop programmable gene-editing enzymes designed from scratch using AI.
The round also saw participation from Spectrum Impact and DeVC, along with angel investors including Dr Vijay Chandru, Paras Chopra, Sanjiv Rangrass, and Vatsal Dusad.
The company said it will use the capital to further develop its AI-based protein design platform, grow its research team across AI and biophysics, and scale wet-lab validation of gene editors for agricultural and medical applications.
Mandrake Bio is building gene-editing enzymes that it says are smaller and tailored for specific use cases. The company combines generative AI with biophysics to design proteins from scratch before testing them in the laboratory.
Current gene-editing tools such as CRISPR-Cas9 face limitations in both agriculture and medicine, according to the company. In agriculture, conventional breeding can take 10 to 15 years to introduce a new trait into commercial crop varieties, while gene editing can reduce that timeline to one or two years.
Existing editors often require tissue culture, which adds time and infrastructure requirements. In medicine, approved gene-editing therapies are largely ex vivo and can cost millions of dollars per patient, while in vivo approaches remain constrained by delivery challenges and the size of existing editing enzymes.
Mandrake said its approach is aimed at overcoming these constraints by designing compact, programmable editors for specific applications rather than relying on naturally occurring proteins.
The company also pointed to its recent performance at the GEM × Adaptyv RBX1 protein design competition held during ICLR Rio 2026. According to Mandrake, its protein design engine generated the only submission rated ‘Strong’ among more than 12,000 entries.
Founded in 2025 and headquartered in Bengaluru, Mandrake Bio was established by Tanay Lohia and Dr Kutubuddin Molla.
Lohia previously led carbon-credit and climate resilience programmes at Absolute before joining AI research lab Lossfunk, where he developed the foundation for Mandrake.
Molla, a senior scientist at ICAR-CRRI, is among the first researchers to demonstrate the compact gene editor TnpB in plants.
“We’ve always been limited by the tools we discovered in nature. At Mandrake, we use generative AI and biophysics to design proteins from scratch instead, so that improving a crop needn’t take a decade, and a transformative therapy needn’t cost millions,” said Lohia, CEO of Mandrake Bio.
“Our designs already stand among the best in the world, and they're coming out of India. This is the chapter where we start writing biology, not just reading it,” he added.
Pratyush Choudhury, Co-founder of Activate, said AI's next wave of impact would extend beyond software into fields such as biology, chemistry and materials science.
“We believe India has the talent to build companies at that frontier. Mandrake is a great example: combining world-class AI with deep biological science to create entirely new gene editing tools from first principles,” Choudhury said.
Nitin Sharma, Partner at Antler, said the startup is addressing a core challenge in gene editing by combining AI, biophysics and laboratory validation.
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