Mandrake Bio raises Rs 16 crore to build AI-powered gene-editing platform for agriculture, medicine

Bengaluru-based startup Mandrake Bio has raised Rs 16 crore in a funding round co-led by early-stage venture firms Activate, founded by Aakrit Vaish, and Antler India to develop programmable gene-editing enzymes using generative AI.The round also saw participation from Spectrum Impact, DeVC and various angel investors, including biotech veteran Vijay Chandru, entrepreneur Paras Chopra, Sanjiv Rangrass and Vatsal Dusad.

The fresh capital will be used to expand the company's AI and biophysics teams and accelerate “wet-lab” validation of its platform.

Founded in 2025 by Tanay Lohia and ICAR scientist Kutubuddin Molla, Mandrake has a 10-member team comprising AI researchers, computational biologists and molecular scientists.


"The next wave of AI breakthroughs won't come from software alone—they'll come from applying AI to disciplines such as biology, chemistry and materials science," said Pratyush Choudhury, cofounder of Activate. "Mandrake combines frontier AI with deep biological science to build entirely new gene-editing tools, and we believe India has the talent to build companies at that frontier."

Nitin Sharma, partner at Antler India, said the startup is tackling one of biology's biggest bottlenecks by redesigning the gene-editing enzymes themselves rather than building applications on top of existing technologies.

Marrying AI with gene editing
Gene editing has long promised crops that can better withstand climate change and therapies that can treat diseases. Despite breakthroughs such as CRISPR, scientists still rely on naturally occurring DNA-editing enzymes, which are expensive and difficult to adapt for different applications.

Mandrake Bio believes artificial intelligence can help redesign those tools.

"DNA editing is a horizontal technology. Whether you're building a better crop or a gene therapy, both start by editing DNA and use largely the same technology stack before the applications diverge," Lohia, who serves as Mandrake Bio’s chief executive, told ET. "Until two years ago, researchers had to search for enzymes in nature and spend years trying to improve them. Generative AI now allows us to design entirely new enzymes in two to three weeks and then validate them in the lab."

Mandrake says that unlike conventional gene-editing approaches that rely on existing systems such as CRISPR-Cas9, it uses open-source protein language models trained on biological sequences and fine-tunes them using its own metagenomic database to generate new gene-editing enzymes.

The AI narrows thousands of potential protein candidates before they are validated in the company's wet lab, reducing the number of expensive laboratory experiments required.

Lohia, who previously worked on climate resilience and carbon programmes at agri-biotech firm Absolute before joining AI research lab Lossfunk as a resident, said the startup expects its first wet-lab validation results within the next two months.

Licensing tech
The company is initially targeting agriculture, where current gene-editing workflows can take seven to eight years to develop an improved crop variety. Mandrake expects purpose-built editors to potentially reduce that timeline to around two years.

The same technology could also make gene-editing therapies more affordable. While existing therapies can cost between $2 million and $2.5 million for a single gene edit, better-designed enzymes could eventually bring those costs down to around Rs 50-60 lakh, and also reduce treatment timelines, Lohia said.