A Series A funding round led by IAN Alpha Fund and Speciale Invest, with participation from Tenacity Ventures, BYT Ventures, and other investors, has raised Rs 70 crore ($7.7 million) for the drug discovery company Peptris.
According to a press release from Peptris, the new funding will be utilized to improve teams in the fields of biology, chemistry, data science, and artificial intelligence, as well as to expand the company’s pipeline over the next 24 months and move its current programs closer to clinical readiness.
Peptris, which was co-founded in 2019 by Narayanan Venkatasubramanian, Shridhar Narayanan, Anand Budni, and Amit Mahajan, has developed AI models to produce new molecules and forecast a variety of parameters that are essential to lowering drug development failures. Opportunities for drug repurposing, rescue, and the discovery of Novel Chemical Entities (NCE) have resulted from this strategy.
The company, based in Bengaluru, claims that despite scientific advancements, drug discovery is still sluggish, costly, and prone to failure, leaving significant medical needs unmet. During the pre-clinical phase, when time, money, and scientific uncertainty frequently cause promising programs to fail long before drugs reach the clinical stage, this challenge is at its most severe.
According to Peptris, its platform helps predict important drug development parameters early on in addition to producing novel molecules. This facilitates quicker and more informed decision-making and has already led to the identification of Novel Chemical Entities (NCEs), opportunities for drug rescue and repurposing, and several programs currently moving closer to clinical development.
In addition to several drug repurposing and rescue programs (sheltered clinical stage drugs of other companies), the company intends to launch a number of new NCE programs. It uses a B2B engagement model, licensing assets and co-developing programs in close collaboration with pharmaceutical, biotech, and specific FMCG partners. In order to make a lasting difference for patients, caregivers, and healthcare systems around the world, the startup focuses on therapeutic areas such as rare diseases, inflammation, oncology, and women’s health.
