Startup Mantra: Innoplexus is transforming healthcare with AI
In the bustling corridors of IIT Bombay, two ambitious students embarked on an endeavor that would, years later, lead to the inception of a company poised to revolutionize the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. Gaurav Tripathi and Gunjan Bhardwaj—co-founders of Innoplexus—set out on a path that began with the simple act of starting a Hindi newspaper for their peers. This experience, though seemingly unrelated, laid the foundation for their understanding of the crucial role data plays in our lives.
Fast forward to 2011, Tripathi and Bhardwaj established Innoplexus, an AI-driven platform aimed at addressing inefficiencies in the pharmaceutical industry, particularly in drug discovery. The motivation behind Innoplexus sprang from a deeply personal episode: the cancer diagnosis of Bhardwaj’s mentor. This event propelled them to delve into the intricacies of drug development, a journey that underscored the pivotal necessity for advanced tools to aid scientists in the drug discovery process.
The initial conviction that drove Innoplexus was simple yet profound: massive amounts of data could be leveraged to significantly impact the pharmaceutical field. With an ambition to make extensive medical knowledge readily accessible, Innoplexus embarked on a formidable task. By 2021, they had achieved a milestone of crawling 10 billion pages of life sciences data, transforming the landscape of drug discovery and development. Their AI tools have remarkably reduced the time required to assess drug efficacy and toxicity from months to just days, a revolutionary advancement for the industry.
Finding their first customer turned out to be an unexpected twist of fate involving a candid moment during an online call with Juergen Raths, a significant figure in the pharmaceutical realm. This serendipitous interaction underscored the potential of Innoplexus to outperform existing tools in the market, landing them their first client and paving the way for collaborations with over 30 top pharmaceutical companies and several clinical research organizations.
The journey from bootstrapping the company with an initial investment of ₹25 lakh to seeking external funding highlighted the challenges and the persistence required to navigate the investment landscape. The quest for the right investors, who not only understood Innoplexus’s vision but were also ready to support it financially, led them across continents. To date, the company has raised about 110 million Euros, with plans to secure an additional 200-250 million Euros to further enhance their computing capabilities and attract top talent.
Looking towards the future, Innoplexus envisions becoming an end-to-end drug asset manager with an aim to dramatically increase the number of drugs entering the market each year. With only 55 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2022, the company’s goal is to significantly boost this number, thereby making a profound impact on global health.
Innoplexus stands at the forefront of an AI revolution in healthcare, demonstrating how innovation, powered by data and driven by a personal mission, can lead to transformative solutions for some of the industry’s most persistent challenges.
