Funding · Agriculture & Food Systems

Mandrake Bio raises ₹16 crore pre-seed round

By Startup Enthusiast · 16 July 2026

What they do

Mandrake Bio designs programmable gene-editing enzymes from scratch using generative AI and biophysics

It raised ₹16 crore in pre-seed funding co-led by Activate and Antler India

The startup aims to cut crop improvement timelines from 7-8 years to ~2 years and reduce gene therapy costs

Mandrake Bio raised ₹16 crore in pre-seed funding.
The round was co-led by Activate and Antler India.
Spectrum Impact and DeVC participated in the round.
Angel investors Vijay Chandru, Paras Chopra, Sanjiv Rangrass, and Vatsal Dusad also invested.
The startup will use the funds to expand its AI and biophysics teams and scale wet-lab validation of its platform.
It expects first wet-lab validation results within two months.
Mandrake Bio won the global GEM × Adaptyv RBX1 Protein Design Competition at ICLR 2026, the only design with the highest 'Strong' rating among over 12,000 submissions.

Gene editing tools like CRISPR rely on naturally occurring enzymes that are expensive and hard to adapt.
Mandrake Bio designs new enzymes from scratch using AI, bypassing these limitations.
The startup aims to reduce crop improvement timelines from 7-8 years to ~2 years using purpose-built editors.
It also targets bringing gene therapy costs from $2M-$2.5M down to ~₹50-60 lakh per edit.

Mandrake Bio is a foundational protein design startup building programmable gene-editing enzymes from scratch.
It uses generative AI, biophysics, and wet-lab validation to create these enzymes.
The technology employs open-source protein language models trained on biological sequences, fine-tuned with its own metagenomic database.
AI narrows thousands of protein candidates before wet-lab validation, reducing expensive experiments.
Target applications include agriculture (crop improvement) and medicine (gene therapies).
The business model is to license proprietary gene-editing enzymes to seed companies and therapeutic developers.
The team has 10 members — AI researchers, computational biologists, and molecular scientists.
It is headquartered in Bengaluru, India and was founded in March 2025.

Activate (co-lead) — Early-stage VC that invests $500K-$3M as first institutional investor and runs Asia's largest gen AI community.
Antler India (co-lead) — Led by Rajiv Srivatsa and Nitin Sharma, invested in 80+ startups from a ₹600 crore ($75M) pre-seed fund.
Spectrum Impact (participated)
DeVC (participated)

Product: Programmable gene editing enzymes using generative AI and biophysics
Customers: Agricultural and pharmaceutical/medical companies
How it makes money: Licensing of gene editing technology
What sets it apart: Combines generative AI with first-principles biophysics for compact and precise gene editors