E-Paper
Startup Mantra: Innoplexus is transforming healthcare with AI
Gaurav and Gunjan, co-founders of Innoplexus, use AI to speed up drug discovery in the pharma industry. They have 30+ top pharma clients and raised 110 M Euros in funds.
PUNE It is now well known that ‘data is the new oil.’ Sure, but the crux of the matter lay in how to use this ‘new oil’. For Gaurav Tripathi and Gunjan Bhardwaj then young students of IIT Bombay, and now co-founders of Innoplexus, their experience with data started quite inadvertently.
Says Gaurav, “IIT in those days had no Hindi newspaper for students so Gunjan and I started one. We met students and wrote about events, interesting submissions and so on. Then we’d take all our content and go to a small printer near the campus and get it printed and then distributed. In those days we both did all the stories but sometimes used different names so it would look bigger than it was. But slowly people started coming forward and participating.” Years later their paper, Awaaz, is still running. “This I think was something we learnt about data on the ground,” says Gaurav
But life was to give them more such experiences that later led them to set up Innoplexus in 2011. Innoplexus is an AI platform that helps the pharma industry solve inefficiencies to speed up and accelerate drug discovery.
“Gunjan’s mentor was diagnosed with cancer and while that was emotionally heartbreaking, we tried to search for the best cancer specialist, and then question ourselves if this really the best that can be done or is there more?” While sadly they lost their mentor, it made them look more deeply into the business of drug development.
“The challenge was not the science. Drugs can be developed, but scientists need the right kind of tools to speed up the process of drug discovery. And then the problem was not limited to this only but also at the clinical and commercial stage of a drug’s life cycle,” said Gaurav.
The training with the experience made them realise that they could use AI to help scientists discover new drugs and also help them at the stage of clinical trials and commercialisation.
Initial steps
“To begin with we felt that there is immense data that can be brought to the fingertips (of pharma cos) that can help them. The amount of medical knowledge is said to double every 73 days (reference: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3116346/)
In 2016 Google Cloud did a case study on us where we demonstrated that we can crawl a billion pages from the life sciences universe. This was updated to 10 billion in 2021. Now that is vital info available to anyone who needs it, but the question is who can scan through 10 billion pages to find out what you need?” As an example says Gaurav “Let’s say a pharma company has a drug developed and it has shown to work, however, while this new drug (say an antihypertensive drug) reduces BP, it also causes some toxicity. When this is done manually, that is to find out what the toxicity outcomes can take months. With our AI tool, we have brought it down to days.” Result, they license out the use of Innoplexus data, platform and AI models to pharma companies.
Finding customers
It was a rude outburst that led Innoplexus to its first customer. Says Gaurav, “Gunjan knew Juergen Raths who was a senior marketing head of Eli Lily, an American pharmaceutical company, who had now started his own pharma company in Europe. He organised an online call with him and Juergen in Germany and me here. Juergen was showing us the online tool his company was using and it was taking too long to load. In the meantime, Juergen was talking while it was loading. Without realising that I was not on mute, I said, ‘... we can do better’
Telling a prospective customer so plainly that his current tool is pathetic definitely cannot be a good start. However, it worked. “While Juergen was upset he was willing to see what we could do for him,” says Gaurav. And that was the start of a fairly long line of customers, 30+ top pharma companies and 7 clinical research organisations.
Funding
Gaurav and Gunjan initially invested ₹25 lakh and needed more. “We bootstrapped the company till 2016 and then decided to raise funds to scale it further. In our minds, we knew that raising funds is about meeting the right investor who will understand what we do.”
“While most Venture capital (VCs) did not understand what we did, a few who understood didn’t take the step of putting their money in. It was a partner from the top Indian VC firm, who told us that no one here will know the problem you are trying to solve, you need to look for funds in the market you are serving. We did that. In our journey to date, we have met about 750 investors, angels etc. and have got the ones who believed in what we are doing. It worked. To date we have raised about 110 M Euros from investors across Europe and need to raise further 200-250 M Euros to invest in our computing power and on the best talent,” says Gaurav.
Future
“We see ourselves as becoming an end-to-end drug asset manager and want to be the world’s largest one, bringing out hundreds of drugs in the market. As of 2022 the pharma industry got only 55 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), if we can take this figure to hundreds then it will have a huge impact on the world’s health,” said Gaurav.
