Bengaluru-based Peptris Technologies has secured ₹156 crore in total funding through a combination of government grants and private investment. The company received ₹86 crore from the government's Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) Fund earlier this month, while also raising ₹70 crore in Series A funding led by IAN Alpha Fund and Speciale Invest in February. According to reports, this funding will enable the startup to advance four of its preclinical assets through development phases, positioning it to transition into a full-fledged discovery and development firm with more development capabilities brought in-house.
Founded in 2019 and incubated at C-CAMP campus in Bengaluru, Peptris Technologies operates an AI-driven drug discovery platform that accelerates molecule discovery for wet-lab testing. The platform was developed through serendipitous collaboration between former AstraZeneca R&D head Shridhar Narayanan and software engineer Venkatasubramanian Narayanan, who met through their children's school events. As reported, the company's proprietary AI platform is designed to be agnostic to disease areas and therapeutic targets, helping mitigate the binary success-or-failure risk inherent in traditional biotech startups. The platform generates novel molecules and identifies new targets for previously approved drugs, with the startup benchmarking its performance against global open-source models like Boltz 2. According to CEO Venkat, the advantage lies in its technology being agnostic to disease area and therapeutic target, helping the company avoid the major risk of relying heavily on a single lead asset.
Peptris Technologies has already achieved commercial success by out-licensing its repurposed drug candidate PEPR124 (RT001) to Revio Therapeutics for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). According to reports, this molecule, originally used to treat diabetes, received orphan drug designation from the US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) to accelerate its clinical pathway for the rare, fatal neuromuscular disorder affecting approximately 400,000 people in India. The orphan drug designation offers various incentives like market exclusivity, fee waivers and regulatory assistance. The company maintains a vast preclinical pipeline working across oncology, rare diseases, inflammation and other therapy areas, with its focus on diseases with high unmet medical needs. There are an estimated 7,000 rare diseases today, of which 95% have no cure yet, representing the scale of the problem the startup aims to address.
According to reports, Peptris Technologies aims to transition into a full-fledged discovery and development firm with the fresh capital, bringing more development in-house. The company's CEO Venkat emphasized that while AI can accelerate discovery and development phases, it doesn't solve the problem entirely, requiring rigorous biochemical, cellular and animal testing. As reported, the startup combines technology expertise with India's cost advantages, positioning itself to differentiate in the competitive global biotech market. According to C-CAMP CEO Dr Taslimarif Saiyed, Indian biotechs must identify distinct niches within a globally competitive market to differentiate themselves. For Peptris, this combination of convergence of deep expertise, highly accessible early-stage capabilities, and cost advantage where they can do more in less money provides a competitive edge. The company's algorithm is designed to identify "off-targets" for a given molecule—evaluating how it might bind to proteins beyond its primary intended target, expanding the scope of diseases and drug targets for which candidate molecules can be identified.
