Association of Biotechnology Led Enterprises (ABLE) in its White Paper on “India’s biotech ecosystem” has indicated that the 1022 start-up companies in the sector and it has attracted over US $2.8 billion  investments in the five years from 2012 to 2016.

Housing 190 start-ups which have sprung up between 2012-2016 and Bengaluru is the biotech start-up capital of India. National Capital Region (NCR) is ranked 2nd with 164 start-ups followed by Mumbai (163) and Hyderabad (160).

“This is good news and we are aiming to double this number with the ABLE Start-ups 2020 initiative to take the count to 2020 companies by the year 2020 and US $5 billion investments,” said Dr PM Murali, president, ABLE and chief executive officer, Evolva India.
 
The start-up revolution is touching the biotech sector. This demonstrates  the interest level to leverage science and engineering capability, said Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, chairman, ABLE and CMD, Biocon.
 
“We are also seeing the start-ups moving to inflection point. There are regulatory hurdles. We are requesting the government to ensure that the start-ups are free of any regulatory requirements until they are ready to commercialise the product. The government for our sector is trying to simplify the regulations. We are confident this will happen when the industry works closely with the regulatory authorities and with the policy makers,” she added.
 
“ABLE takes pride in initiating a ‘mentoring’ cell of senior industry leaders to guide the next generation of biotech entrepreneurs and create the world’s most vibrant biotech ecosystem in India. In fact, many senior ABLE members are already mentoring start-ups in their individual capacities so far and these efforts will be further strengthened”, noted Biocon chief.
 
Highlighting the facts of the White Paper, Narayanan Suresh, COO, ABLE, said that of the 1022 new start-ups, 104 were formed in 2016; 367 during 2014 and 2015. Another 551 companies were established between the years 2012 and 2014.The ABLE study on “India’s Biotech Start-ups Ecosystem” found that over 3,000 new entrepreneurs have joined the ecosystem and at least a third of them are women entrepreneurs.

It is also reported that private equity investments into these companies was around $2.6 billion and the balance came from own investments, government grants, and others like HNIs. Year 2015 attracted investments to the tune of  $851 million.
 
The bio-pharma sector continued to dominate the industry, accounting for 57 per cent share of the companies formed. This was followed by Bio-research (16%), Bio-agri (10%), and Bio-industrial (9%). Around  40 per cent of the companies are engaged in manufacture and about 16 per cent start-ups were into medical health instruments/appliances and R&D services respectively.

The study was done by ABLE’s in-house research team by sifting through voluminous data on company formation from ROC databases. This is the first such study to map India’s biotech start-ups ecosystem. The Association is expected to release more such on various aspects of India’s $40 billion bio-economy.