StrainX Bioworks raises $13 million in round led by Prime Venture Partners

Other investors in the round included Good Startup, Sparrow Capital, Sun Icon Ventures, Dholakia Ventures, and WindT Angels, which was founded by IIT Delhi alumni.

The company will use the new funding to improve its research and development, increase its fermentation production capacity, hire more engineers and scientists, and launch its products faster in global markets. StrainX also plans to build stronger partnerships with food and ingredient companies worldwide as it expands its production.

“Investors were particularly encouraged by the scale of the opportunity and our early positioning in the segment in India,” Akshay Mittal, founder and CEO of StrainX said. “Globally, there are only a handful of companies working on what we are building, and India offers a strong advantage through its deep talent pool and long-standing expertise in fermentation-led manufacturing.”

“StrainX stood out to us because it combines two things that are rarely found together in biotech: serious science and sharp business execution,” Brij Bhushan, managing partner at Prime Venture Partners, said in a statement.

Founded in 2023 by IIT Delhi alumni Mittal and Alok Malaviya, Bhopal-based StrainX works in synthetic biology and precision fermentation, where specially designed microbes are used to produce useful ingredients, proteins, and molecules inside large industrial tanks.

The company said it has spent the last two years building its technology and capabilities in areas like microbe engineering, fermentation, production scaling, and product development before publicly announcing its work.

StrainX uses engineered microbes to make ingredients that are usually taken from plants or animals. These microbes are grown in controlled factory environments using fermentation technology to produce proteins and ingredients on a large scale. While this method has been widely used in the pharmaceutical industry for years, it is now becoming more popular in food, nutrition, and consumer products as production costs fall.

The startup said it has already tested production at a 10,000-litre fermentation scale and is now working to expand further before launching commercially in India and global markets, including the US.

StrainX also said its platform combines biotechnology, fermentation systems, process engineering, and product development into one integrated system to help bring products from research to large-scale manufacturing more quickly.

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