HealthKois eyes biotech bets as new drug pipelines expand

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Venture capital (VC) firm HealthKois is sharpening its focus on life sciences innovation as it evaluates investment opportunities for its $300-million third fund, amid a growing pipeline of Indian startups in biotechnology and drug development.

“We are seeing significantly more startups now in this space than before,” co-founder and general partner Ajay Mahipal told Mint in an interview. These are emerging across artificial intelligence (AI)-led drug discovery, cell and gene therapy and other areas of biotech innovation at different stages, he added.

“From our perspective, we are looking at biosimilar companies, vaccine companies, bioprocessing platforms, generative medicine, and precision oncology as some of the spaces where we think credible businesses can be built,” Mahipal added.

The Delhi-based healthcare-focused VC firm was established in 2025 as a successor fund to HealthQuad, building on its first and second funds. The fund, with its corpus of $300 million, plans to invest between $7 million and $25 million per company in early growth-stage businesses operating across healthtech, life sciences, medtech, healthcare delivery and climate health.

The growing investor interest comes as India’s drug innovation system reaches what industry experts describe as an ‘inflection point’. In the past decade, 10 new drug candidates have originated from Indian companies and biotechs, compared to just one molecule two decades ago.

A joint report launched by HealthKois and BCG on Wednesday charts this momentum in drug discovery, identifying key trends and building blocks required to expand India’s innovation opportunity.

PE/VC investment into pharmaceutical companies rose 2.1x in five years to $731 million in FY26, and the number biotech startups grew from roughly 1,500 to 2,400 in the same period, the report states. The innovation pipeline emerging from the country expanded approximately 1.5x to more than 1,095 drug discovery programs across 195 companies, while pharma patent families originating from India climbed from roughly 716 in 2015 to 2,995 in 2024, lifting India’s share of global pharma patents from 3–4% to about 10%, it said.

Access to private capital, specifically patient private capital, has been a major constraint for Indian biotech firms. “The difficulty comes from the fact that in the US, 60% of VCs have a certain depth of understanding in life sciences and biotech, while in India, only 10 to 15% of venture capitalists do,” said Charles Janssen, co-founder and managing partner at HealthKois. “They don’t understand how to assess these opportunities…they don’t know how to value the intellectual property (IP), and that leads to smaller Series A rounds,” he said.

However, with a few early successes, like Glenmark’s landmark $700 million outlicensing deal with AbbVie last year, valuing innovation and IP is no longer a purely theoretical exercise, but rather a space where “people are starting to map out and see that there is an investment opportunity that can be attractive,” Janssen said.

“You're going to see an increase in the percentage of VCs in India who are going to go through the pain of improving their knowledge and experience in the space,” he added.

The shift is also being supported by a combination of government funding, regulatory reforms, improving industry-academia collaboration and the creation of common research infrastructure. Government-backed programmes have made early-stage risk capital increasingly available, while drug approval timelines have narrowed from more than 180 days to around 60-120 days in some cases, bringing them closer to international standards.

Although the progress has been slow, the ten breakthrough molecules over the past decade are not a coincidence, but rather a result of various building blocks coming together, argued Priyanka Aggarwal, managing director and senior partner at BCG India, and ...