We love telling people how Tanay started: farming ghost peppers in Assam, once the hottest chilli in the world. He went on to lead a World Bank-backed programme insuring more than 25,000 farmers against bad seasons, and kept running into the same painful story. Tonnes of crops lost because they were genetically too weak to survive pests, floods and heat. Why was there no accessible way to make crops tougher, other than poisoning the fields with pesticides?

Gene editing could be that tool, but the best editors today are bulky, heavily patented and found by trial and error. Tanay's idea was to stop searching nature for them and design them instead: with AI, compact, and free of anyone's patents. As an auto-didact, he taught himself everything he knows about AI-led gene editing, and his first designs beat the world's top protein-design labs in an open global competition. 

He was also able to recruit his Scientific Co-founder Dr. Kutubuddin Ali Molla to the cause. A prominent Indian agricultural biotechnologist and plant genome engineer - he serves as a Senior Scientist in the Crop Improvement Division at the ICAR-National Rice Research Institute (NRRI) in Cuttack, Odisha, where he is also the Principal Investigator of the Centre of Excellence (CoE) on Genome Editing. Dr. Molla is highly recognized for his pioneering research in CRISPR-Cas systems, base editing, and prime editing aimed at creating climate-resilient and disease-resistant crop varieties.

Mandrake Bio is starting with agriculture, where improving a crop takes a decade or more today. With the right editor, it could take just two years.

FOUNDER

Tanay Lohia, Founder & CEO

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