Bengaluru – Mandrake Bio, a foundational protein design company designing the next generation of programmable gene editors, has raised approximately ₹16 crore in pre-seed funding. The round was co-led by Activate and Antler, with participation from Spectrum Impact and DeVC, alongside angels from the AI and biotech ecosystem, including Dr Vijay Chandru, Paras Chopra, Sanjiv Rangrass, and Vatsal Dusad.
Gene editing – the ability to make precise changes to a living organism’s DNA – sits at the heart of two of the most consequential domains of the century: agriculture and medicine. In agriculture, conventional breeding takes 10 to 15 years to move a single trait into a commercial variety; editing can compress that to one or two. In medicine, it opens a path to treating genetic diseases at their source rather than managing them for life.
Both are bottlenecked by the same problem: today’s leading gene editing enzymes, such as CRISPR-Cas9, aren’t the best editors for many of these use cases. In agriculture, they typically require tissue culture – a slow, infrastructure-heavy process that can keep a breakthrough trait out of the varieties farmers actually grow for nearly a decade. In medicine, the only approved gene-editing therapies today are ex vivo and can cost millions per patient. In vivo editing – editing directly inside the body – is only now reaching late-stage trials and remains bottlenecked by delivery and by the sheer size of today’s editors.
Mandrake aims to flip this. Using AI and protein design, it builds entirely new editors – purpose-built for the use case – from scratch. The company pairs generative AI with first-principles biophysics to build compactness, precision, and dynamic control directly into each candidate enzyme, then validates it in the wet lab.
The approach has already produced hard evidence it works. Mandrake recently won the global GEM × Adaptyv RBX1 protein design competition at ICLR, Rio 2026. Mandrake’s design engine generated the only submission rated “Strong” among more than 12,000 designs from groups worldwide. Designing a novel protein with precise, pre-specified function is the exact capability gene editors demand, and it is the same engine now driving the design of Mandrake’s editors.
Mandrake was founded by Tanay Lohia (Founder & CEO) and Dr Kutubuddin Molla (Scientific Co-founder). Tanay brings five years of experience across agriculture and biotech, most recently leading carbon-credit and climate-resilience programmes at Absolute. He deepened his work in molecular biology and AI as a resident at Lossfunk, a premier Indian AI research lab, and built Mandrake out of that program. Dr Molla, a senior scientist at ICAR-CRRI, is among the first researchers in the world to demonstrate TnpB – a compact gene editor – in plants. The broader team draws from leading labs & companies worldwide, such as Inari, UCSF, and the University of Southampton, alongside graduates from IITs and BITS.
“We’ve always been limited by the tools we discovered in nature. At Mandrake, we use generative AI & 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. 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.”
— Tanay Lohia, Founder & CEO, Mandrake Bio
“The next generation of AI breakthroughs won’t come from software alone – they’ll come from AI transforming disciplines like 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. We’re excited to partner with Tanay, Kutubuddin, and the team as they build a global company from India.”
— Pratyush Choudhury, Co-Founder, Activate
“Mandrake is going after one of the deepest bottlenecks in biology — the editors themselves — with a rare combination of AI, biophysics, and wet-lab discipline. Tanay lived this problem for years in agri-biotech, and the team’s early external validation gives us real conviction they can build foundational tools from India.”
— Nitin Sharma, Partner, Antler
The funding will be used to advance Mandrake’s AI protein-design platform, expand the core research team across AI and biophysics, and scale wet-lab validation of designed editors across agricultural and medical applications.