IISc spin-out Venomics AI raises $2.7 million to mine animal venoms for new medicines with AI
Venomics AI, founded by IISc venom biologist Kartik Sunagar, has raised a $2.7 million pre-seed round co-led by Speciale Invest and South Park Commons. It is building a 'Venom Atlas' and AI models to turn venom molecules into drug candidates.
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Snake venom is usually thought of as something to neutralise. Pharmacologists also see it as one of nature's most refined chemical libraries. Over millions of years, venomous animals have evolved peptides and proteins that act on blood pressure, clotting, pain signalling and the nervous system with great precision. Several modern medicines started this way. The blood-pressure drug captopril came from studying a pit viper's venom, and ziconotide, used for severe chronic pain, derives from a cone-snail peptide.
A new Bengaluru start-up wants to search that chemistry far more systematically. Venomics AI, spun out of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), has raised $2.7 million (about ₹25.5 crore) in a pre-seed round. The round was co-led by Speciale Invest and South Park Commons, with Operators Studio joining. Reports describe it as the company's first institutional funding.
Who is behind it
The company is co-founded by Kartik Sunagar, an associate professor at IISc who leads the Evolutionary Venomics Lab at the institute's Centre for Ecological Sciences. Sunagar's group is known for its work on how venoms evolve and differ between and within species, and for its research on antivenoms. It has documented, for example, how snake venom changes as a snake ages, which affects how well antivenoms work.
His co-founder and CTO is Vinay Prabhu, who holds a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University and works on machine learning and large-scale AI systems. The pairing says a lot about the company. It is betting that pairing deep biological knowledge of venom with modern AI can turn an underused natural resource into a working drug-discovery engine.
The discovery opportunity
The traditional route to venom-derived drugs has been slow. It often starts with a single animal, a single venom and years of purification and testing. Venomics AI is trying to turn that into a pipeline that can work across many molecules at once.
How the platform works
According to the company and its investors, the process has three linked steps:
- Sequencing and venom biology. The team characterises venoms at the molecular level and builds what it calls the Venom Atlas, a dataset of venom-derived compounds linked to their measured biological activity.
- AI ranking. Machine-learning models rank and prioritise candidate molecules for particular targets. The accessible report describes computational prioritisation linked to experimental screening; it does not establish which model architectures will perform best.
- Wet-lab validation. Predictions are then tested in the company's own functional laboratory screens. The results go back into the dataset, so the models improve over time.
The Venom Atlas is likely to matter most. Protein language models and structure predictors are now widely available. What competitors cannot easily copy is a large, well-labelled set of venom molecules linked to experimental results. Sunagar's years of field and lab work give Venomics AI an early lead in building one.
Where the money will go
The company plans to use the funds to:
- expand the Venom Atlas and its molecular dataset;
- strengthen its AI and lab-screening capabilities;
- hire across venom biology, computational science and drug discovery;
- validate and optimise its most promising molecules.
Venomics AI is part of the NVIDIA Inception programme for start-ups. Reports also say it is among the top five finalists for the 2026 Indo-Boston Biotech Bridge Award.
Why it matters for India
India has one of the richest venomous faunas in the world and one of the heaviest snakebite burdens. That has made venom research a matter of public health in India, but it also gives Indian scientists unusual access to biological diversity and deep expertise. Venomics AI is trying to turn that expertise into drug discovery in general, not only antivenoms.
The start-up also fits a pattern the Indian deep-tech ecosystem has been trying to encourage: professors at leading institutes such as IISc turning long-running research programmes into companies. Investors who back early-stage research spin-outs, such as Speciale Invest, are central to that pattern. So is the arrival of US-linked platforms such as South Park Commons in Indian biotech.
There is also a global angle. AI-led drug discovery is crowded, but most platforms work on human proteins or synthetic chemical libraries. A platform built around venom chemistry, with its own proprietary data, gives Venomics AI a different position, and one that could interest pharmaceutical partners anywhere.
What to watch
Pre-seed funding pays for capability, not drugs. The real tests will be whether the platform produces molecules that hold up in further studies, how quickly the Venom Atlas grows, and whether the company can sign early partnerships with drug developers. Venom-derived drugs have a long history. Whether AI can produce them faster is still unproven.
Even so, the round shows what is changing. A field that once meant fieldwork in snake country and slow biochemistry in academic labs now has a venture-backed company, an AI stack and a proprietary dataset behind it. It is an Indian start-up, built on Indian research, working on a global drug-discovery problem.
Sources
- https://indianstartupnews.com/funding/venom-to-drugs-startup-venomics-ai-founded-by-iisc-professor-kartik-sunagar-raises-27-million-12785748
- https://www.biospectrumindia.com/news/20/28788/venomics-ai-raises-2-7-m-to-advance-venom-based-drug-discovery.html
- https://india.entrepreneur.com/business-news/venomics-ai-raises-usd-2-7-mn-to-advance-venom-based-drug-discovery
- https://inc42.com/buzz/venomics-ai-raises-2-7-mn-to-turn-venom-into-medicine/
- https://www.ciol.com/news/venomics-ai-raises-2-7-million-ai-venom-drug-discovery-12785774
- https://yourstory.com/2026/11/startup-news-and-updates-daily-roundup-november-05-2026
- https://startuptalky.com/news/daily-indian-funding-roundup-key-news-5-november-2026/
- https://www.caplight.com/company/venomics
- https://kernel.iisc.ac.in/from-birth-to-bite-how-snake-venom-varies-with-age/
- https://www.venomicslab.com/