Venomics AI raises $2.7 million to hunt drugs inside animal venom

Venomics AI, a Bengaluru biotechnology company spun out of the Indian Institute of Science, said it raised $2.7 million in a pre-seed round co-led by Speciale Invest and South Park Commons, with Operators Studio participating, to expand its venom-derived drug discovery platform.

Evolution already did the hard part: it built molecules that hit biological targets hard and specifically. Venomics AI's bet is that AI plus a wet lab can search that library at scale instead of one peptide at a time. $2.7 million is a seed, not a moonshot, but the thesis is the same one that quietly gave cardiovascular medicine captopril.

Venomics AI raised $2.7 million in its first institutional funding round, a pre-seed co-led by Speciale Invest and South Park Commons, with Operators Studio participating. A pre-seed is the earliest outside money, before a company has a medicine to sell. Institutional means the checks came from funds. Those lines are the company's, as reported by Business Standard, ET Entrepreneur, and Entrackr.

The Bengaluru company was spun out of the Indian Institute of Science, IISc. A spinout is a company started from a university lab. It was co-founded by Kartik Sunagar, founder and director, who is an IISc professor, and Vinay Prabhu, co-founder and chief technology officer, who has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon. Purba Sarkar appears with them in the Business Standard team photo. Those lines are from the coverage.

The money goes to expand the Venom Atlas, the company's molecular dataset of animal venoms; strengthen AI and laboratory screening; hire across biology, computational science, and drug discovery; and validate and optimise promising molecules. A dataset, here, is the library of venom molecules the company has recorded. Those lines are the company's.

The platform sequences and characterises venoms, uses AI to prioritise molecular candidates, and tests predictions through functional screening in the lab, feeding results back into later rounds of prediction and design. To sequence a venom is to read its chemical recipe. Functional screening means trying a molecule in a lab test to see what it actually does. Those lines are the company's.

Existing medicines inspired by venom peptides include captopril, from snake venom, and ziconotide, from a cone snail. A peptide is a short chain of amino acids, smaller than a typical protein. Captopril is a blood-pressure drug. Ziconotide is a pain drug. Speciale Invest and the press coverage also place GLP-1 drugs in that broader venom-to-medicine lineage. GLP-1 drugs are the class now used for diabetes and weight loss. Those lines describe older medicines. They are not a Venomics AI product. The lineage is from Speciale Invest and the coverage.

Kartik Sunagar said: "Animal venoms represent one of nature’s richest yet least explored sources of potential medicines, and at Venomics AI, we are combining cutting-edge experimental science with artificial intelligence to unlock this extraordinary potential." That quotation is his.

The company has joined the NVIDIA Inception programme, NVIDIA's program for startups, and was selected among the top five finalists for the 2026 Indo-Boston Biotech Bridge Award. Those lines are from the coverage.

The picture is the Venomics AI team in their lab. Left to right: co-founder and chief technology officer Vinay Prabhu, Purba Sarkar, and founder Kartik Sunagar. The credit is Business Standard.

In plain terms, a Bengaluru company spun out of IISc raised $2.7 million to build a library of animal venoms and use AI plus lab tests to look for drug candidates in it. Captopril and ziconotide are the proof that venom has become medicine before, for other companies. This round is a pre-seed.