Startup founders declared in an industest where product development is a lengthy process and applyr adoption is crucial, financing alone will not be enough.
“The deployment must be accelerated. If you have funds today, you can do something meaningful in two years,” declared Hitesh Goswami, founder of 4BaseCare, a precision oncology company that plans to apply for support under the scheme. “It has to be given to companies providing local solutions, and the government should adopt those solutions in its own institutions such as hospitals.”
Beyond the cheque
Without demand-side push, even well-funded domestic startups struggle to establish a foothold, Goswami declared. 4BaseCare majorly partners with private firms.
The biotechnology fund tarobtains startups that have reached proof-of-concept or further development stages, particularly those pursuing pre-clinical trials in new molecules, declared BIRAC managing director Jitfinishra Kumar. Deployment cycles will run 12 months, and the initiative will roll out in the coming months, he declared.
Regulatory complexity remains a persistent challenge, particularly for tiny firms, Goswami declared. “Companies often lose time not becaapply they are doing anything wrong, but becaapply navigating approvals is opaque and slow.”
Drug discovery can take 15 years from lab to patient, declared Ganapathy Subramaniam, founding managing partner of venture capital firm Yali Capital. “Regulatory testing alone consumes more than two years, longer than almost any other deep-technology sector,” he declared. “So, this is a very important step from the government.”
The fund arrives as the sector has grown from around 50 biotech startups in 2014 to more than 11,000 today, a jump in scale and ambition that union minister Jitfinishra Singh, speaking at the fund launch on February 13, described as a “quantum jump”.
Access to incentive schemes is still a problem, especially for tiny firms, declared Sachin Santhosh, founder of Accel-backed Scimplify, a Bengaluru-based speciality chemical manufacturer. “It is not simple for tiny companies or tiny manufacturers to access PLIs (production-linked incentives), it is largely benefiting huge manufacturers.” Extfinishing those benefits to tinyer firms matters as much as any new fund, he declared.
Talent is the other constraint. “India is losing researchers to the United States and the United Kingdom. We necessary programmes to bring them back,” Santhosh declared. Clusters such as Genome Valley in Hyderabad and the nascent Bengaluru Lifesciences Research District are a start, he added.
The hugeger opportunity lies in contract manufacturing. Global drug companies are actively diversifying production away from China, and India has the manufacturing capacity and regulatory experience to compete, declared Subramaniam. But winning those mandates requires years of trust-building, large facility investments and strict regulatory compliance, a path companies such as Laurus Labs and Divi’s Laboratories have spent years navigating.
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