This Startup Wants to be GitHub for Nutraceuticals

In industries like nutraceuticals, functional foods, and wellness, product development is often slow, fragmented, and heavily dependent on disconnected experts. Most brands rely on a patchwork of consultants, testing labs, regulatory agents, and contract manufacturers. According to food consulting firm Foodsure, the cost of developing a complex product can reach up to ₹4 lakh ($4,000+).

One solution is moving the entire R&D lifecycle to the cloud, powered by proprietary data and layered AI. This is what Bengaluru-based food R&D platform Bettrlabs is betting on.

“Product development has always been expensive, slow, and opaque,” JP Mohanty, Co-founder and CEO of Bettrlabs, tells AIM. “Today, a founder has to manage 6 to 10 disconnected actors. Every time knowledge passes between them, value is lost.”

There is also a lack of deep scientific expertise among emerging brands, especially when it comes to making validated health claims. India’s food and wellness sector is approaching $535 billion, driven by increasing demand for nutraceuticals, functional foods, and Ayurveda-driven products, according to the Chamber for the Advancement of Small and Medium Businesses. 

“If you claim a product is ‘high-protein,’ that claim has to be backed by science,” he adds. “Most brands simply do not have that expertise in-house.”

Bettrlabs is working to streamline the process and make it more cost-effective. The co-founder notes that the company aims to compress product development timelines from 6–12 months to 6–8 weeks by relying on proprietary datasets. These include structured ingredient intelligence, where each ingredient carries thousands of attributes spanning nutrition, chemistry, and gastronomy, as well as manufacturing and compliance data.

“We use existing foundation models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini,” the entrepreneur explains. “But what we have built is a validation and correction layer on top of those models, powered by our proprietary data.”

By integrating formulation, compliance, and manufacturing into a single platform, Bettrlabs is positioning itself as a full-stack R&D infrastructure layer—almost like a GitHub for nutraceuticals.

The Founding Team

Mohanty, who started working on the idea in April 2024 and founded the company in 2025, is a serial entrepreneur. A decade ago, he founded the foodtech startup Eatby to develop a food-taste analytics solution and was also the co-founder of a Singapore-based startup focused on automated checkout using camera vision and AI. 

Now, instead of building yet another AI tool, he focused on deeply digitising the physical product innovation segment.

Betterlabs’ founding team leans largely on enterprise, scientific, and operational expertise. COO Ravinkumar S and CTO Prathap Raj both come from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). On the science side, Bettrlabs is backed by domain experts, including Beena Rai, who holds over 180 patents and was Chief Scientist at TCS, and S Pappula, who leads strategic research.

“We are built by operators and scientists,” Mohanty notes. “That combination is critical because this is not just a software problem; it is a deep science and execution problem.”

The startup is also supported by IIT Madras Incubation Cell, Google for Startups AI Academy, AWS Activate, and The/Nudge Institute.

Revenue and Funding

Just about a year in, Bettrlabs already has a client portfolio of over 350 brands and is drawing interest from larger FMCG players, including Deep Holistics, Cookr, Nourisho, Mosaic Wellness, and Foodchain ID. “We are generating ₹3.3 lakh ($3,500+) in MRR (monthly recurring revenue) with zero marketing spend,” says Mohanty.

The startup is now raising a pre-seed round to scale its AI capabilities and go-to-market efforts, with a target of reaching $1 million in ARR within a year of closing the round.

Competition & USP

While AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini are widely accessible, Mohanty argues that they are not designed for regulated product development.

“General AI tools are trained on public internet data,” he says. “What we have built is entirely different. Our datasets are proprietary, and our outputs are grounded in real-world manufacturing and compliance.”

The startup’s key differentiator lies in its accountability-driven approach. Bettrlabs claims an accuracy rate of 85–90%, and backs its output with a guarantee.

“If we fail to deliver, we refund your money,” Mohanty asserts. 

Bettrlabs operates in a fragmented ecosystem where players like TraceGains, Centric Software, Tastewise, NielsenIQ, and FoodChain ID address only parts of the product journey, forcing brands to rely on disconnected consultants, labs, and advisors.

“The real competitor today is the fragmented model, independent consultants, contract labs, and regulatory advisors with no shared workflow,” says Mohanty. “Bettrlabs brings all of this into one platform, built for the speed modern brands need.”

Despite its promise, the journey has not been without challenges. Building reliable proprietary datasets in highly regulated sectors requires significant effort and domain expertise.

There is also the broader challenge of changing how companies approach product development. In India, many brands still rely on trend-based replication rather than original innovation.

“The bigger problem is that most companies still copy-paste products,” Mohanty says. “We are trying to change that.”

Convincing companies to trust AI-driven formulation, especially in categories tied to health and compliance, remains an ongoing hurdle.

Looking ahead, Bettrlabs plans to expand beyond nutraceuticals into adjacent categories, including food processing, personal care, and Ayurveda. “The roadmap expands into any regulated physical product category where the R&D infrastructure is broken,” Mohanty says.